History on Wheels

Yamaha's retro bike

2011-12-04T17:26:00.000-08:00

Now that I seem to have killed the battery in my e-bike by letting it drain down to zero (something that lithium ion batteries apparently do not like), I'm trying to figure out my next step in keeping some kind of car alternative on the road. On the one hand, I could just shell out for another battery. Or...I could get one of these cool things. It's bound to be the more expensive option, but it sure looks like it would be fun to ride. It's an update of Yamaha's first motorcycle, the YA-1, first manufactured in 1955 (at left). The new version, the Y125, is supposed to get close to 200 mpg, which would get me to the grocery store and back any number of times (that's the trip that killed the bike battery).

Heritage wheels: Anything but old

2011-11-29T04:18:00.000-08:00

I've been reading an article by Bernhard Rieger on the Volkswagen Beetle* this evening as I'm prepping for tomorrow's session of my "Cars, Culture, and Place" seminar at Tufts. I think I like teaching this class for the same reason I like teaching about tourism: car culture and the tourism industry just never fail to amaze me in their inventiveness in making darned near anything into a marketable product, and teaching a course on them is a great way to find out what they've been up to lately. Reading about the history of the Beetle made me decide to go see how VW is marketing the new, all-new, really new 2012 New Beetle on its website, where I found a great example of heritage marketing and how it performs the classic modern trick of selling us the past and the future simultaneously.

On the "Profile Update," just under where it says "Completely redesigned," there's an option for "Heritage wheels," which turn out to evoke the classic style of 1960s Beetle wheels. "Close your eyes and picture the classic wheels," the text says. "They're too iconic to forget, right?"

Then when you click on "Details," you get the having-it-both-ways message: "Now open your eyes and see how cool they look taking us into the future. That’s right, we redesigned the old wheels to be completely cool and anything but old." Old, yet new--what could be better than that?

One of the things that Rieger's article shows is that German VW executives at the home office in Wolfsburg initially resisted the idea of introducing the New Beetle in 1998, not grasping the potential appeal of a somewhat-nostalgic, somewhat-ironic retro-vehicle for American buyers. The roll-out ad campaigns capitalized on this highly postmodern blend, but it struck me that the current promotion for the 2012 model shows how hard it is to sustain the momentum of the nostalgic/ironic impulse over time. Despite the evocation of the Beetle's status as an icon ("Those crisp, clean, curved lines hark back to the original"), there's actually nothing playful, ironic, or--ironically--really new about the way the car is now being marketed.

That sense of playfulness was a big part of the novelty of the original VW ad campaigns, which became almost as iconic as the car itself, and the New Beetle was able to play off of some of that older creative energy. Based on my short cruise through the website tonight, though, VW has turned to a highly conventional approach to promoting the car at this point: emphasizing its cool features and posing it in dramatic settings. Even novelty gets old, I guess--or maybe the real irony is that novelty gets especially old. As Alfred Sloan showed a long time ago when he brought the model year and built-in obsolescence into the car industry, constant change is an essential ingredient of getting people to buy new cars before they really need them. Within that logic, invoking the past is a tactic to be used sparingly, when you use it at all.

*"From People's Car to New Beetle: The Transatlantic Journeys of the Volkswagen Beetle," Journal of American History, June 2010 (pp. 91-115).

Living history at the motor court

2011-11-06T17:21:00.001-08:00

I posted a piece on the NCPH "Off the Wall" blog last week about the phenomenon of "ubiquitous display" that we're exploring in our reviews over there. I got another great example of this while I was in Plymouth, Mass. for the New England American Studies Association conference this weekend. I was staying just north of the town center at what seemed to be a generic Best Western motel, but when I was in the lobby on Saturday morning I noticed a set of four black and white photos on the wall that didn't seem to be the usual motel décor.

The photos showed what appeared to be equally generic buildings: a ranch house, a New England farmhouse, some small roadside cabins. When I asked about them, though, the woman at the counter told me they showed the motel site in its earlier life, first as a horse farm and then, after 1949, as a motor court. She pointed out that some of the cabins could still be seen along busy Route 3A, the main road that goes through this heavily-visited town.

I was pretty tickled by this "heritagization" of a slice of automobile and tourism history, which memorialized--albeit in a low-profile way--both the era of the post-World-War-II "heritage boom" and the transitional phase between auto camping and the motel as we know it today.

I was even more tickled later in the weekend when I learned from Karin Goldstein, Curator of Collections and Library at Plimoth Plantation, that the Plantation's creator, Harry Hornblower, had originally planned to site the living history village on a different piece of land from the one it now occupies. But the property he bought was expropriated by the state for the construction of the highways that carry traffic from Boston to Plymouth and points south, including the vacation mecca of Cape Cod. Hornblower was forced to turn to Plan B, which was to locate the village on land he inherited from his grandmother.

The expansion of the region's tourist economy in the 1940s, which presumably prompted the owners of the horse farm north of the town center to add their motor court, displaced Plimoth Plantation before it could even be built. At the same time, of course, the new road was a crucial mechanism for bringing visitors to what quickly became one of Plymouth's most popular attractions. I don't know what Harry Hornblower thought about that turn of events (it would make a fun piece of research, for someone with the time to do it!). But my guess is that he probably felt the kind of ambivalence that most of us experience in relation to car culture. We use our cars to escape from the modern world that has given us the car and all its attendant problems; we rely on things we deplore (like sitting in traffic on a crowded, noisy road) to facilitate things we love (like the chance to stroll down a recreated 17th century street in a living history village). Tourism displays usually work to hide the fact that the two kinds of experience are in fact integrally linked, but the photos in the motel lobby brought brought that into visibility in an interesting way. It was subtle, like the unlabeled photos themselves, but it was an admission that car tourism, too, has a "living history," in which we're all taking a role.

Highway heritage vs. the fossil fuel industry

2011-07-27T06:03:00.000-07:00

As a counter-balance to the purely celebratory uses of automotive heritage that I wrote about in my last post, here's an example of using heritage designation in much more activist and critical ways. Calling themselves "The Rural People of Highway 12," a coalition centered in Idaho is using Route 12's various scenic and historic designations as key tools in their fight against the growing numbers of oil companies using the road to haul half-million pound "megaloads" of drilling equipment north to the expanding tar sands oil fields in Alberta.

Started in the 1920s, Route 12 was originally intended as a freeway running between downtown Detroit and Madison, Wisconsin. It was extended to Yellowstone National Park in 1939, and then absorbed into the Interstate system starting in the 1950s. By 1969, it reached its terminus on the coast of Washington state.

Like Mass. Route 2, the road I'm currently studying, it's one of those highways that's been overlaid with various heritage designations in recent years. It's the paved spine of a number of scenic, historic, and recreational routes: the Northwest Passage Scenic Byway (designated as a byway in 2002 and as an All-American Road in 2005), part of the TransAmerica Bicycle Route (itself something of a historic site, having been created as part of the "Bikecentennial" in the 1970s), a couple of Wild and Scenic River corridors, and parts of the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail and the Nez Perce National Historic Trail. According to the Rural People website, Motorcycle Magazine called it the best recreational motorcycle route in the nation ("many curves, much beauty" notes the website).

The Rural People of Route 12 see themselves as David fighting Goliath, and when you go up against the fossil fuel industry, that's pretty much the size of it (as Tim DeChristopher just discovered in Utah after disrupting a federal auction of oil and gas leases in that state). Heritage designations, like historic preservation laws, can seem like very puny weapons in that kind of fight, as the same urgent drive toward automobility that created Route 12 in the first place continues to push us to keep feeding our petroleum habit despite the increasing evidence of how ultimately suicidal this is. Most of these designations themselves are intended to draw visitors to the region, and nearly all of those visitors are going to be arriving in some kind of two- or four-wheeled vehicle.

So it's a paradoxical strategy at best. But it's a strategy, and it seems much more intelligent than celebrating automobility in a more simple-minded way. Tar Sands Action's planned late-summer civil disobedience campaign in Washington, DC is a more direct and potentially consequential kind of action, and I hope we start to see more and more serious protests (including from my surprisingly quiescent Canadian compatriots) against this environmentally ruinous plan of extracting the oil in the Alberta tar sands. If highway heritage can play any role in all of that, it's all to the good.

Indy at 100

2011-05-28T07:52:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted for a while, but couldn't let Memorial Day weekend go by without noting the centennial of the Indianapolis 500. Sport is a highly ritualized activity, where participants and audiences often share a strong consciousness of the lineage and history of what they're doing (in recent years I've gotten tired of hearing the phrase "storied franchise" used in describing one sports team or another, but it does capture that sense of heritage that surrounds so many sports organizations and venues, particularly in an era of increased interest in vintage and retro sports of all kinds). Unlike a lot of heritage activities, there's no distinct break between past and present in sport (except in the cases of defunct franchises, like this one). And car culture, of course, is anything but past. So sport involving cars is a great way to get a sense of how contemporary car afficianados are thinking about the automobile's past.

As I noted in a previous post, they're definitely doing that in a celebratory rather than a questioning way, reinforcing the notion of "heritage" as a realm where it's difficult to bust anyone out of the mindset that accepts the present as a natural extension of a progressive past. With events like the Indy 500 centennial, it's all about veneration of past heroes, participation in folk traditions, and communion with places that have acquired the patina of legend (in addition to its enshrinement in commercial and popular culture, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway has the blessing of the National Park Service with its placement on the National Register for Historic Places in 1975 and the granting of National Historic Landmark status in 1987).

It's also about the commemoration of technological innovations, and not always high-tech ones. For example, the humble rear-view mirror made its first official appearance on the winning car at the 1911 Indy 500 (that's it on the right, at the famous Yard of Bricks that remains from the 1909 brick course). Driver Ray Harroun was unable to find a mechanic to ride along with him and perform the important job of letting him know who was behind him, so he supposedly borrowed the mirror idea from a horse-drawn vehicle he'd seen, although the notion already seems to have been in use by women drivers who used their hand-mirrors in a similar way. This cars-and-history project of mine has kicked up so many juicy metaphors and turns of phrase that I've come to resist all of them as clichéd (driven to the past, life in the past lane, you get the picture). But something about celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the rear-view mirror strikes me as particularly apt for thinking about how automobility's promise of charging forward into the future depends on a keen awareness of a past that's never quite as settled as we'd like to imagine it is.

If Ken Burns made car ads

2011-04-10T18:32:00.000-07:00

Car ads are like little zeitgeist-meters. They’re amazingly responsive to all kinds of social anxieties, which they instantly repackage in ways that allow us to continue feeling good about driving. Feeling nationally or personally emasculated? Concerned about the transition into being a soccer mom? Worried about climate change? Fear not. You can buy a minivan and still be hot; owning a Nissan Leaf will cause you to be hugged by grateful polar bears. All is well in the world of the car ad.

Which is why Chrysler’s “Imported from Detroit” ad, which debuted in a two-minute version during the 2011 Super Bowl and has been running in a shorter format since then, is so striking. It brings the anxiety right into the frame of the commercial, using image, music, and association to evoke the long pain of deindustrialization and the resulting gutting-out of cities and economies. The full-length spot, which has topped ten million views on YouTube, features Detroit-based rapper Eminem driving through the city in a gleaming new Chrysler 200 (née Sebring) while a raspy male voice discusses the city’s ups and downs over footage of monuments, factories, athletes, homes. The opening riff of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself," a nervous insistent strumming, permeates the piece, giving it much of its edgy feel. Eminem winds up at the stunningly restored Fox Theater, where the guitar riff merges with a vocal crescendo from a black gospel choir on the stage, dropping to a reverent hush behind his somber delivery of the line, “We’re the Motor City, and this is what we do.”

I have no particular trouble finding things to critique about this ad, because, well, that’s what I do. There’s a subtle “othering” of Detroit’s industrial and postindustrial working people, in the “Imported from Detroit” tagline and in the images of past struggles—Diego Rivera’s famous Detroit murals, the gigantic iron fist of the memorial sculpture to Detroit boxing great Joe Louis—and present production of goods (the unseen workers behind the gleaming Chrysler 200) and services (the doorman who nods to Eminem as the car rolls past an upscale hotel). Despite the invocation of working-class heroisms and skills, the emphasis here is on luxury and the relationships that sustain it. The doorman’s brief nod seems to reinforce Rachel Sherman’s argument that these service-economy laborers become complicit in creating and sustaining the very hierarchies that limit their own options (see Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels, University of California Press, 2007). This othering of the working class is subtly racialized, particularly in in the appearance of the gospel choir, which, as Douglas Harrison notes, is a kind of convenient shorthand in American pop culture for moral strength and resilient human spirit, appearing to transcend race while drawing on histories of racial struggle. The ad also plays with the romance of ruins, but very fleetingly, in a early brief shot of an empty building façade that is immediately superceded by more heroic and positive images. It hints at the struggle-and-recovery story even while it draws on the aesthetic fascination of decay and decline (the contemplation of which has become almost an industry in itself around Detroit).

So there’s lots to question here. But what I really find myself thinking when I watch this ad is, “Damn, these guys are good.” Never mind that it’s difficult to tell what’s an “American” or “imported” car at this point; never mind that the real challenge for places like Detroit is to try to discover what they might become apart from the gigantic industries that dominated them in the 20th century. The ad works on the level of myth, implicitly tying together the histories of labor and racial struggle, industrialization and deindustrialization, Detroit and America, TARP and Toyota, in a way that asserts persistence and resilience on every level. Oh, and it’s selling a car, too. The fact that the car seems like an after-thought only makes the ad more effective. This is the “tragedy with a happy ending” that William Dean Howells famously said Americans prefer when they go to the theater. It invokes loss, but in a way that feels shared and thus ultimately unifying. It is, in short, a Ken Burns film.

If Ken Burns made car ads, he would work for Portland, Oregon-based Wieden + Kennedy. W+K is fully capable of making jauntier car ads; their popular “Hate Something, Change Something” campaign for Honda, aimed at improving the image of the diesel engine in the U.K., was chirpy and upbeat (and wouldn’t it be nice if someone would undertake a similar makeover for diesels in the U.S.?). But they’re also not afraid of sentiment, and they’ve learned a thing or two from Burns about evocative music and how to enlist the gravitas of difficult histories without allowing them to provoke too many questions that might disrupt that bittersweet sense of shared struggle. (Their recent ad for Royal Enfield motorcycles is really a hymn to the city of Chennai, arguably the Detroit of India. Watch it and tell me you don’t find yourself thinking of Burns’s Civil War series.)

Ken Burns moves historical materials into the realm of the mythic, and W+K is moving that powerful combo into the realm of advertising. It’s daunting to think about how to counter that technique. A few comments on the YouTube ad do take a critical tack, but the overwhelming response is emotive and supportive. The ad creates a kind of virtual vernacular memorial space for the slow disaster that is Detroit; people are asserting solidarity and pride in a way that seems directed at the city’s working class but that is really being stimulated on behalf of capital, not labor. What would a counter-myth for a post-industrial, less car-dependent society look like? When we find one, we may do well to take a leaf out of W+K’s book when we're ready to sell the public on it.

[NOTE: This piece is cross-posted from the NCPH blog "Off the Wall." If you feel inspired to comment, please do so over there.]

High fuel prices = instant heritage?

2011-03-16T16:52:00.000-07:00

In the face of rising fuel prices, Cars.com, a joint venture of several big media companies, has revived an earlier feature, the "Gas Saving Moment of the Day." These tips, ranging from advice on keeping your tires properly inflated to a suggestion that it wouldn't hurt Americans collectively to lose a few pounds, date to the last big spike in oil prices, back in 2008. Of course, most of the same ideas and advice could be heard during the "oil shocks" of the early and late 1970s, and variations on the same theme came up during the gas rationing of the World War II years (remember "When you ride alone, you ride with Hitler"?).

This seems to offer yet more evidence, as if we needed it, of our collective amnesia and denial when it comes to fossil fuels (we know our fuel mileage is better if we drive at 55 mph, but we don't act on it until prices rise or we're faced with shortages). But this cycle of forgetting and remembering and re-remembering is also starting to have heritage-like overtones to me. Every time we hit one of these patches, we dredge up our rather limited repertoire of suggestions about how to save fuel. And while some new ideas do get added to the list each time, there's also enough sameness that it can't help but resonate with past experiences of being reminded that oil is not, after all, an infinite resource. (Even some of the newest ideas aren't all that new--for example, there have always been hybrids and alternatives, including those that run on wood and air.)

And those suggestions themselves--slow down, use older and less energy-intensive forms of transport, act in community by car-pooling or taking the train, become more aware of the mechanics and physics of your vehicle by checking tire pressure, etc.--represent something of a retreat from the faster-is-better individualism and convenience that drives so much of car culture. It's like a little taste of living history, with echoes of earlier periods of austerity and an unwilling but not necessarily unpleasant acceptance of different values.

All of this doesn't amount to anything quite as conscious as a revival movement or a mobilization of folk culture, but it feels to me as though there's something quasi-heritage-like taking shape here. Heritage theory shows us how commemoration and obsolescence often go hand in hand, with preservation sometimes even coming first and helping to redefine something as "past" even while it's still a part of everyday life. With each layer of rediscovery that gets added to our histories of high fuel prices, perhaps we're actually seeing the first inklings of a real shift into post-fossil-fuel mobility, nudged along by historical resonances that are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

The 1944 poster image above, by Harold Von Schmidt, is from the New Hampshire State Library.

The presence of the ancestors on Route 2

2010-10-21T06:13:00.000-07:00

Route 2 in Massachusetts is a pretty mythic road, to my eye. You've got the cradle of the nation at the eastern end, with Lexington, Concord, the Battle Road, and all that 1775 stuff. On the western side of the state, the Mohawk Trail evokes a romanticized Indian past, linked infrastructurally with the dawn of the car age itself. I've been thinking about all of that as I drive back and forth to Boston, and trying to figure out how to connect it with the very ordinary experiences of roads and driving that usually feel very ahistorical and disconnected from larger histories or contexts.

So I was tickled to hear Royalston storyteller Norah Dooley's recent story about her experience of finding herself as a driver--and connecting with a personal past--on Route 2. Her short piece, called "Transported: Driving with the Ancestors" is online here. I still think that modern highways separate us from history in insidious ways, but Norah's story confirms my sense that there's more to be explored in terms of how drivers make their own mythic connections to this and other spaces of automobility.

Neo-bohemia meets living history: the Dodge Challenger campaign

2010-09-22T05:04:00.000-07:00

It's hard to know where to start deconstructing the recent "Freedom" ad campaign for the Dodge Challenger. First aired during the World Soccer Cup meetup between Britain and the U.S., the central TV ad in the campaign is an incredibly rich and mythic little text, with three black Dodge Challengers (the lead one driven by George Washington himself) roaring out of the American mountains to scatter a waiting group of British redcoats. American flags wave from the windows of the cars, as they did everywhere after 9/11. A plaintive violin soundtrack clearly evokes the elegiac nationalism of a Ken Burns documentary, while the expressions on the faces of the panic-stricken Brits neatly invert the historical Native American experience of being overwhelmed on the open battlefield by a mysterious and vastly superior technology. Guns, here, are no match for the internal combustion engine and the awe it inspires--it's "a f***ing black monster," in the words of one of the production crew in the "making of" video. In the tag line at the end--"Here's a couple of things America got right: cars, and freedom"--the emphasis is subtly on the word "America," a not-so-subtle poke at non-American car producers (are you listening, Toyota?).

One of the many things that strikes me about this ad is the neobohemian ethos and location of the company that created it. Wieden + Kennedy (and oh, how tired I'm getting of that plus sign as a shorthand for corporate hipness) is a design firm headquartered in Portland, Oregon and with outposts in several major cities around the world. Like Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, Chevrolet's new ad firm which I wrote about in an earlier post, W+K projects a counter-cultural image that's very appropriate for Portland's civic image of carefully-nurtured weirdness. The firm's homepage includes nuggets from its corporate philosophy, ranging from the counter-intuitive ("Hire wrong") to the provocative ("Creativity comes out both ends"). Photos of W+K's personnel similarly emphasize artsy individuality and in-your-face funk.

But in their work for Target, Levi, Chrysler, and others, these creative types are neatly knitted into the circuits of global capital, perhaps in the kinds of ways that Richard Lloyd writes about in his great book Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City (Routledge, 2006). Lloyd's book takes a detailed, ethnographic look at the music, art, and design scenes in Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood, and concludes that big-time capitalism has become very adept at mobilizing the talents and desires of economically marginal artsy workers, allowing for a workplace atmosphere that retains what is bohemian while enlisting the products of these workplaces in its own quest for accumulation. What I love (in a perverse way) about the Dodge Challenger ad campaign is the way all of this is pulled together with a Ken Burns/History Channel/reenactor kind of sensibility. It's as though we've reached the point where the forms of high capitalism truly can absorb and hybridize any and all cultural materials, from what I assume are the leftie and progressive artists of Portland to the gun-totin' centrists, conservatives, and libertarians of the reenactor world. Now, that's an achievement to put fear into anyone trying to take a stand against it!

Roads scholarship

2010-09-07T17:16:00.000-07:00

Is it just me, or are people actually beginning to pay more attention to the histories of roads? Road history is something I'm exploring in my own (fairly slow-moving) research at the moment, relating to Massachusetts' Route 2, the road I spend a good deal of my time on. But a couple of interesting pieces of work also came to my attention this summer, focusing on both the distant and recent past of one of the east coast's most-traveled corridors.

I've been reading (also slowly) Eric Jaffe's new book The King's Best Highway: The Lost History of the Boston Post Road, the Route That Made America (Scribner, 2010), which follows the first organized postal route in colonial America (Ben Franklin, anyone?). The book isn't terribly weighty, but it does give a sense of some of the political, military, and other factors that went into creating the road, which has now morphed into coastal Route 1 and inland Route 91 in central New England.

There's a bit more critical depth in parts of National Public Radio's series about everyone's least favorite road, I 95. I'm looking forward to going through the segments in detail one of these fine days, although some things about the mix are a little jarring--for example, the juxtaposition of a segment on the hardships of migrant workers traveling up and down the coast with one called "Eat Your Way Down I-95." I guess that's how it is with highways, though--love 'em, hate 'em, can't hardly avoid 'em.

Inadvertently recreating car history

2010-09-05T15:18:00.000-07:00

Route 2 in north-central Massachusetts was closed for three hours this past Friday because of an accident just west of Athol, where I live, and all of the holiday weekend traffic got diverted along Main Street of my town and the one next to it. “I kept looking out the window and thinking, boy, there are a lot of campers and trailers going by,” a woman at the pizza place said. “I thought everybody must be coming here for the weekend, but then I realized there was something else going on!”

We don’t usually have major traffic jams here, so this one has been a topic of conversation for the past couple of days. It has struck me, though, that that kind of traffic was probably similar to the way Main Street used to be before it was demoted to Route 2A and a bypass--now the main Route 2--was built in 1957. In fact, at one time Athol was something of a magnet for auto tourism, in the days when public “autocamps” catered to newly mobile Americans in search of both automobility and the great outdoors.

Warren Belasco’s 1979 book Americans on the Road: From Auto-Camp to Motel, truly an oldie but a goodie in the academic literature on car culture, chronicles the progression of this fairly short-lived form of auto touring. Because early American automobility was limited to the well-to-do few who could afford cars, and because there was a dearth of paved roads in most of the country, touring by car in the 1910s involved roughing it. Many of the first auto-campers relished the challenges of the road, including the necessity of fixing their vehicles on the go, meeting fellow enthusiasts, seeing the “real” America on their own timetable, and stopping to camp whenever and wherever they wished.

Farmers and others whose fields and roadsides became impromptu campsites were less enthusiastic, and by the 1920s, a network of somewhat more formal—although still rustic—autocamps had developed across the U.S. to service the growing numbers of car tourists. One of the first of these camps in New England was on Route 2A (then Route 2) in Athol, opened in 1921 in a pine and hemlock grove at the top of a long hill that leads into the town from the east. Like other municipal auto camps, it was intended at least in part to boost the town’s image by providing a free amenity to people from outside the area.

It appears to have done this quite effectively. A local paper reported favorable comments by many 1924 campers: “This is the best treatment that has been offered to us by any New England town,” one visitor wrote in the guest book. “Thanks Athol,” wrote another. “You are a wide awake burg.” By this time, the American Automobile Association estimated that there were between 10 and 20 million autocampers on the American roads each year (Belasco, p. 74), and people were becoming better-informed about the more desirable camping spots, as well as more discriminating about services offered. Cars from 48 American states were spotted in the Athol autocamp in 1925, by which time it offered a central kitchen, toilets, running water, and electric lights.

But the Athol autocamp had another side to its existence. The camp was situated on the property of the Town Poor Farm, essentially a home for the indigent and impoverished, who were expected to help defray the cost of their upkeep through labor on what was then a working farm. The Overseers of the Poor also managed the autocamp, as well as selectively harvesting the wooded property on which the Poor Farm and the camp were located; in 1923, about half a million board feet of chestnut and pine timber were cut and sawn, with the money being turned over to the town. (The autocamp and roadside were left forested.) As a combination of tourist facility, social service agency, and farm/forestry program, Athol’s Poor Farm and autocamp seem intriguing and possibly unique.

It didn’t take many years for the charm of autocamps to pall. As the comfort of roads and cars improved, a more specialized travel infrastructure began to develop, offering greater privacy and comfort both on the road and off of it. Private camps that charged a fee took over from free municipal camps like Athol’s, while the expansion of the tourist population in the 1920s and 30s caused some unease among motorists who liked the ideal of meeting the “real” America but didn’t necessarily want to camp right next to it. The permanently or inadvertently nomadic—hoboes, gypsies, the unemployed who roamed the roads after 1929 in search of work—threatened the carefree mobility of the auto tourist on a two-week vacation. A group of gypsies who made use of the Athol autocamp in July 1924 was asked to leave when they seemed disposed to stay all summer. “This camping ground and log cabin have become quite popular with tourists, and its privileges must not be abused,” a local paper editorialized. Autocampers also became loaded down with so much impedimenta—like the “Kamp Kook” stoves advertised in an Orange newspaper in 1930—that the experience lost any vestige of the rustic. And growing concerns about the effects of car culture on middle-class families, car and campground safety, cleanliness, noise, and—at bottom—social difference in all its forms prompted a shift toward individual cabins and motor courts that eventually evolved into the familiar motels—including the comfortingly familiar brand-name chains—of today.

Athol’s Poor Farm was occupied until 1951, and the old house and barn still stood on the property until last fall (the shot at left was taken in August 2009). Then, with no public fanfare, both were torn down. The property, which spans the distance between Route 2A and Route 2 right at exit 18, is earmarked for some kind of economic development project, although the town and the owners have not been successful at attracting a developer despite several years of effort. In the meantime, they’ve erased a fascinating piece of local history—not only the Poor Farm itself, but its association with the autocamp that Athol built as a way to attract visitors from among the streams of car tourists traveling through the town in the 1920s.

I’m not necessarily saying we ought to have made a tourist attraction out of these sites, although it’s worth noting that two autocamps in Glacier National Park, Rising Sun and Swiftcurrent, have recently been added to the National Register of Historic Places. And I’m not generally a big fan of replacing real things with plaques and signs telling us what used to be there. But even a small marker at the side of the road might have given those thousands of travelers who passed through town at 10 miles an hour last Friday something to ponder—a little-known layer of the past that might have said to all those Labor Day drivers, “This, too, has a history.”

(NOTE: For information about Athol’s Poor Farm and autocamp, I’m indebted to Dick Chaisson’s incomparable local archive. The images below, taken in November 2009 and February 2010 respectively, show the barn site during and after demolition; Route 2 is at the base of the hill seen in the post-demo photo.)

Still heritage, not history

2010-07-18T17:30:00.000-07:00

This week's New York Times Auto section includes a piece that lists about a dozen automotive museums in and around Detroit, including several fairly venerable institutions founded by, or in honor of, or to house the collections of the American auto industry's great white patriarchal figures (Ford, Sloan, Olds, et al.). Looking at the list, I was struck by how old-fashioned it all seems in terms of museology and historiography. Most of these still appear to be essentially industry museums created by companies and hagiographers bent on celebrating invention and achievement, rather than industrial history museums taking a serious look at the very serious subject of cars in America. They're heritage, not history.

I feel a bit funny saying this, because normally I argue against making too simple a distinction between the two, and I tend to be irked when professional historians use "heritage" to denigrate other kinds of history besides the kind they practice themselves. But if this list is representative, our current view of automobility's past in the U.S. does seem stuck in a state that hasn't really been touched by the more questioning perspectives that a rigorous historical approach can bring. There are certainly museums on this list that do work to move their collections in that direction, but the overriding impression I got from looking at the list and the websites of the museums themselves was that uncritical celebration and the veneration of the artifact still rule the day and that the "new social history" of the 1970s and later might as well not have happened as far as most of Detroit's car museums are concerned.

I'm actually not averse to exhibits that let people contemplate an artifact without a whole lot of interpretive apparatus to content with. But so much of our culture is already set up to support that kind of uncritical, seemingly unmediated contemplation of and communion with automobiles. It would be nice to see at least a little more sign that the museums of 2010 were working to create a counter-space for some different ways of seeing the car--and not just through the usual "here's the cool car of the future" endings to automobile exhibits, either.

(I was also struck, looking at the list of inductees to the Automotive Hall of Fame in Dearborn, by the virtual absence of women. I spotted only three among the nearly 350 names: race car driver Shirley Muldowney of "Heart Like a Wheel" fame, driver and sportswriter Denise McCluggage, and our old friend Alice Ramsey, the first woman to drive across the U.S. If you want evidence of what a global Old Boys' Club the car industry is, look no farther!)

No room to maneuver

2010-06-15T06:25:00.000-07:00

So last week Chevrolet made headlines for its half-hearted attempt to get its employees to stop using the nickname “Chevy.” Noting that the company has “a proud heritage behind us and a fantastic future ahead of us” (standard corporate rhetoric that always leaves out any mention of an inconvenient, contested present), the authors of a memo on the subject tried to make a case that good branding demands absolute—one might say totalitarian—consistency.

A startled worker leaked the memo to the New York Times and there was some predictable public pushback. One online commenter who goes by the monicker “JoeProBono” noted, “The people, not the company called those cars Chevy.” The people having spoken, Chevrolet quickly retracted the directive, which had included the hackneyed idea of putting a plastic can labeled “Chevy” in the hallway to collect a quarter every time the banned term was used (the memo-writers noted that the money collected would be used to fund “a team-building activity”).

There’s lots that could be said about this in relation to heritage, but one thing that jumped out at me was that the brand-alignment effort was one of the first projects of the corporation’s new advertising firm, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, which was recently hired after Chevy severed its relationship with Detroit-based Campbell-Ewald. That relationship had lasted, amazingly, for 91 years, since 1922.

Campbell-Ewald grew up with the Detroit car industry and was responsible for such iconic Chevrolet campaigns as "The Heartbeat of America," "Like a Rock," and "An American Revolution.” And its early history, while perhaps not as familiar, was hugely influential in shaping how Americans relate to cars. In the 1920s, under CEO Alfred Sloan, Chevrolet’s parent company General Motors successfully challenged Henry Ford’s dominance by introducing the idea that people should trade in their cars every few years whether the cars still ran or not—anathema to Ford’s frugal notion of keeping vehicles on the road as long as possible. Sloan, abetted by the growing advertising industry, positioned the GM brands in a way that quickly made annual styling and planned obsolescence the way of the American automobile, to such an extent that it’s still seldom challenged or even remarked on—truly, a legacy that most of us are affected by without realizing it.

I have to wonder whether the firing of Campbell-Ewald had anything to do with the embarrassment that resulted from the agency’s 2006 campaign promoting the Tahoe SUV. Somewhat clumsily embracing the world of social media, the campaign invited people to make their own Tahoe ad using a “Chevy Apprentice” program that offered a set repertoire of video clips and music. 20,000 ads flooded in, including about 400 that took advantage of the relative openness of the format to make spoof ads. One presented the Tahoe as a fetishized god and many referenced global warming (what in the world was Chevy thinking, including an image of the Tahoe on a glacier?).

400 out of 20,000 isn’t many—just 2%. But a 2% opening for challenging the hegemony of the car is still something. And it’s better than taking people to task for uttering forbidden words or trying to argue—as Chevy’s new ad agency Goodby, Silverstein does on its website—that “the sense of craft and surprise we associate with art” is fully compatible with the service of capitalism. In fact, that sense of surprise—the carnivalesque spirit that gleefully subverted the Tahoe ad generator and that creates at least some space for reimagining and revivifying aspects of culture—is deeply antithetical to the kind of corporate thinking that can’t possibly question the bases of its own existence. It’s easy to picture executives at bailed-out General Motors saying, “We desperately need fresh thinking—get us a new ad agency,” but almost impossible to envision them creatively engaging with the histories that got us to the oil- and car-dependent state we’re in now, let alone radically re-tooling for a different kind of future. The pathetic attempt to abolish the use of the “Chevy” name—pathetic because it was so unnecessary and so clearly doomed to failure—is a small but suggestive signal of a tottering industry, led by people who don’t dare utter big truths and so are reduced to little acts of control that are the managerial equivalent of patching holes in a wall that’s beginning to give way.

The global car

2010-03-28T11:49:00.000-07:00

Whether March goes out like a lion or a lamb, it's still the time of year when I have to get my car inspected. Inspection time tends to make me testy about the growing extent of the regulatory apparatus surrounding automobiles, particularly since Massachusetts started flunking vehicles whose "Check Engine" lights are on (Gretta the Jetta has a recurring non-safety-related issue that makes her light come on, although fortunately it didn't happen this week, so I have my little sticker in the window that allows me to drive legally for another year).

According to another little sticker, this one on the driver's window, Gretta is a Mexican Volkswagen, made in VW's Puebla plant. (Here's a list of all of VW's plants.) I've been thinking lately about the globalness of the car, in part because I've been reading Matthew Paterson's great book Automobile Politics: Ecology and Cultural Political Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Paterson sees the car as perhaps the crucial technology for the expansion of modern global capitalism, involved in accelerating both production and consumption and in generating and circulating enormous amounts of industrial wealth. The car industry is often seen as the exemplar of a globalized industry, especially during the 20th century; "Fordist" and "post-Fordist" labels for types of production directly invoke the history of auto manufacturing, and car companies have long been leaders in innovating new forms of global supply and financing. Paterson points out (p. 99) that while much of the actual assembly of cars is still done in the "triad" countries of North America, Japan, and western Europe, other parts of the world are beginning to catch up, particularly in component manufacturing.

Within these vast global flows of cars and car parts, there's a little heritage-oriented trickle created by vintage car collectors and enthusiasts--something that's been on my mind because I got an email yesterday from the Alice's Drive project, letting me know that a New York Times article this week featured a story about how the Alice's Drive team assembled their 1909 Maxwell from scratch. (I wrote about this project in a post earlier this year.)

Much of the hunt for Maxwell parts for the cross-country reenactment of Alice Ramsey's 1909 trip took place on the U.S. swap meet circuit, but the Internet was of course a key tool for the team as well. The Times article quotes Richard Anderson, who assembled the car: “My wife and I were on our wedding anniversary in Italy, and we stopped at an Internet cafe to get a cup of coffee and check our e-mails. And there’s an e-mail there from a Maxwell guy who lives in Australia. He said you ought to check out number such and such on eBay, I think these are the levers you need.”

Ordering hundred-year-old American-made levers from Italy on an email tip from an Australian, like driving a Mexican-made German car in New England, underscores the globalness of car-making. But the Maxwell story also makes me realize that automobility's past is still circulating out there, too, in tangible ways that newer technologies make increasingly accessible. This is a pleasing thought, given my sense that we need to see and recognize automobility’s histories (those dim days before the advent of the Check Engine light) if we’re going to remake or unmake it. Perhaps cars are really neither created nor destroyed, but are all just out there somewhere circulating in global flows that we may be able to tap into if we're tenacious enough.

Mass Motorization and the Environment

2010-03-11T22:14:00.000-08:00

So here I am in Portland, Oregon, a famously "green" city (on the way in from the airport I was startled to see people getting on the light rail train with bicycles which they then hung up from hooks on the walls!) at the National Council on Public History/American Society for Environmental History conference. It's always fun to come to conferences and get to encounter what I heard a grad student refer to last year as "walking books" - the actual authors behind what we're reading. In this case, the first panel I attended featured Tom McCarthy, author of the wonderful book Auto Mania: Cars, Consumers, and the Environment (Yale University Press, 2008), one of the first things I read when I started my current study of cars and heritage.

Along with other speakers on the topic of "Mass Motorization and the Environment," McCarthy posed questions about the intersections of policy, politics, and automobility, and reached some conclusions that were ultimately rather dispiriting. He spoke about the Clean Air Act of 1970 as the high water mark of environmental legislation in the U.S., representing "the frontiers of the politically feasible" when it was passed. When states and agencies began trying to enact and enforce its provisions, though, particularly in the Environmental Protection Agency's ill-judged and possibly self-sabotaging promotion of mandatory gasoline rationing in California, public and political support quickly turned negative. The EPA's credibility was badly damaged, and the episode formed part of a backlash against a whole constellation of things (including the 1973 OPEC oil embargo) that suggested to Americans that there might be limits to their expectations of mobility and freedom. Noting that the EPA's projections and data were actually quite solid, given the scientific knowledge about car-based pollution at the time, McCarthy had to admit that "rational argument alone rarely carries the day"--an acknowledgment that echoes the ideas of Bill McKibben and Laura Nader that I wrote about in my last post.

On a slightly more positive note, McCarthy pointed out that although the EPA's data may not have swayed the public, policy-makers inside the Beltway actually did listen to what the scientists were saying, with the result that pressure to entirely gut the Clean Air Act was successfully resisted. Federico Paolini, another of the "Mass Motorization" panelists, offered comparative comfort by showing that Italian regulation of traffic-related problems, including pollution, is only just beginning to be enacted--something that commentator Brooks Flippen said made him feel better about the U.S. government's actions in this area! (Meanwhile, I take heart from watching Portland's light rail trains gliding past the hotel, and tomorrow I'm going to go on a bike tour--in the rain, it seems, but this is the Pacific northwest--to explore some of the city's extensive bicycle infrastructure. Should be fun, if damp.)

Laura Nader on energy and the commons

2010-03-02T11:41:00.000-08:00

I went to hear anthropologist Laura Nader give the annual Distinguished Lecture sponsored by the Greater Boston Anthropology Consortium last week at Clark University in Worcester. Her talk was called “Energy, Environment, and the Commons: The Specialist and the Generalist,” and while she wasn’t speaking about cars or history per se, some of what she said resonated in interesting ways with the reasons why I started this car/heritage research project.

Nader’s talk was a somewhat loosely-strung-together set of points, drawing on her teaching, research, and engagement in energy studies over the past several decades. She argued that in order to “think new” about energy, we need to decouple a number of taken-for-granted equations: that “progress” is achieved through technology, that greater access to energy always equals an improved quality of life, and that the ticket price of energy reflects its actual costs. She also focused sort of obliquely on history, noting that most Americans know little or nothing about the histories of our own energy use and policy, and arguing that in order to wise up about this, we need to look far beyond the industrial and fossil fuel era and think about energy use within the long span of human life on the planet (what some people are now calling “Big History”). Even among people who agree that we need to change our energy habits, she said, we seem stuck in the same unproductive debates about which “alternative” fuel source will let us perpetuate a way of life that is a miniscule blip in the history of human existence, and which is predicated on quickly using up one type of fuel that took millions of years to create. And these unproductive debates give us a society in which, as she put it, “everything changes but nothing moves.”

The role of “the commons” was the least developed idea in her talk, but by implication, she made something of a case for the importance of a discursive or intellectual commons in which we can figure out the fraught questions around energy use in a civil, collective way. She noted that for most of human history—presumably meaning the long phase where humans were all hunters and gatherers—everyone had equal access to sources of energy. It’s only with the relatively recent advent of other modes of subsistence (like agriculture and, of course, industry) that access to energy has correlated to social difference and wealth. I couldn’t tell if she was advocating some kind of utopian return to commonly-held energy sources; her examples of the hopeful signs she sees in the emerging “green” energy sector actually seemed focused on small-scale entrepreneurial projects very much in the capitalist mode. But she did direct a lot of her remarks to the difficulty of having a shared, creative, open civic conversation about energy. She argued for the importance of generalists who can help all of us to “connect the dots” and to overcome the narrowness of either specialization or vestedness in the fossil-fueled status quo.

Her points echoed those made by Bill McKibben—an articulate generalist and a writer I admire greatly—in a recent Tom Dispatch piece. McKibben notes how depressingly easy it is to skew public debate when there isn’t agreement about the basic nature of the evidence we’re looking at (in this case, the always contestable evidence created by scientific inquiry). One side is saying, “Look, we don’t know everything, but on balance, we know enough to be concerned and to take action,” while the other side seizes gleefully on the admission of indeterminacy and uses that to call the whole body of knowledge into question. (McKibben compares this tactic with the way the O.J. Simpson defense team threw enough sand into the works of the prosecution’s case to secure a “not guilty” verdict for their demonstrably-guilty client.)

Like Nader, McKibben sees a need for tolerant, broad-minded thinkers who can weigh different kinds of evidence and not be bamboozled by narrow interests, special pleading, or their own anxieties (which people often displace onto the nearest handy target—say, Al Gore). The goal of producing tolerant, broad-minded, generally-educated thinkers is, of course, the ideal of many people involved in liberal arts education, and it’s also the implied goal of much public history practice, which is where I see a connection between Nader’s and McKibben’s thoughts and my own car/heritage research.

Like science, history is open-ended, always in process, always contestable. And like scientists, historians have a tricky kind of authority, based on careful specialized study but always subject to challenge and possible revision. Scholars are used to challenges from within their disciplines, but when they enter the public arena, they become subject to challenges from those who aren’t playing by the same rules—a situation familiar to public historians who find their work running afoul of community or political opinions. Given how hard-fought the energy and climate debates currently are, perhaps it’s not surprising that historic and heritage sites (with a few exceptions, like this one) have not become deeply involved in those arenas so far. Listening to Laura Nader, though, it seemed clear to me that until we have a more productive space of discourse and debate, we’re unlikely to be able to reinvent our energy use in the ways that we need to do. Looking at the way the climate-change nay-sayers are misreading the recent Washington, DC blizzard, it feels as though we’re a long way away from that kind of commons at the moment, but I want to hope that public historical display might have some role in eventually helping to create it.

(Laura Nader's new edited anthology The Energy Reader, which I'm looking forward to, is due out in a couple of months.)

The things you see when you're not in a car...

2010-02-15T06:08:00.000-08:00

So I've become a little less of a car commuter this semester, by taking the train from Fitchburg to teach my Tufts class two days a week rather than driving all the way to the city from home. (It's still a 40-minute drive to get to the train, but that's how it goes here in car culture...)

In addition to various other benefits, including more time to read and less angst about traffic, I've been enjoying the walk from the train stop in Porter Square to the Tufts shuttle bus stop in Davis Square. It's hardly breaking news that driving through an urban landscape, or any landscape, is like speed-reading through a text, as opposed to the kind of in-depth encounter that can happen when you're on foot, and I wouldn't be devoting a blog post to it except that the very first thing that caught my attention the first day I was making the Porter-to-Davis hike was an art/history panel devoted to, of all things, Somerville's automotive heritage.

I guess I've driven past this many times, but it's not something that's legible from a car. It's one of three panels about Somerville's history, this one focusing on the Ford Motors plant that once existed on the Mystic River waterfront, on the site of what is now Assembly Square Mall (and which, in fact, gave "Assembly Square" its name). Ford relocated the plant there from neighboring Cambridge in 1926, and it thrived before and during World War II, when it manufactured military vehicles. But it didn't survive the Edsel debacle, and closed in 1958.

This was of course the time period when the Interstate highway system was being built, and I 93, which transects Boston, rammed through East Somerville and isolated Assembly Square from the rest of the city--another piece of Somerville's automotive history that it's been trying to overcome in recent years. While the highway isn't going anywhere anytime soon, the city is in the midst of an ambitious partnership with private developers to remake the Assembly Square site as a mixed-use "urban village" that will include access to a cleaned-up riverfront, a new Orange Line subway stop, and a giant Ikea store.

It's nice to see that mass transit advocates seem to have been heard in the planning for this project. Call me cynical, though, but I have to say that nothing immediately jumps out at me from the marketing materials to suggest that this will be anything but another upscale, consumer-oriented, mall-like waterfront development, of the type that the main developer has already built in California, Maryland, and elsewhere. I find these kinds of spaces deeply unsettling, in large part because they're built on so many erasures of past uses of the site, and because their shiny new surfaces mask the gigantic amounts of money and effort spent re-tooling after the bottom has fallen out of yet another attempt to make a place economically viable. (The Ford plant was at Assembly Square for barely 30 years, and the first mall in this location, which opened in 1980, was all but dead 20 years later.)

And the Porter Square panel seems to be a good example of the kind of erasure-through-memorialization that is such a salient feature of places re-tooling themselves in a new economic climate. Like many such history-related displays, it works hard to create a sense of continuity with the past, in this case by making an oblique textual connection between the Ford plant and the former maritime industry that existed on the Mystic River.

But the art piece also works against a sense of historical connectedness. It’s coy on the subject of why Ford left Somerville, leaving viewers themselves to connect the dots between the decision to manufacture the Edsel here, the volatility of the car industry (by the time the Edsel rolled off the assembly lines in 1957, disgruntled American car-buyers were shifting to much smaller models like American Motors’ Rambler and the newly-imported VW Beetle), and fallout from deindustrialization in places like Somerville.

There are other potential connections to be made with the continuing extension of car-based mall culture, or with the fight to expand mass transit and the the accompanying gentrification around new subway stops in places like Porter and Davis Squares, which has meant that many of the working-class Somervillians who assembled cars at the Ford plant no longer live in these places. Tellingly, this panel is on the very opposite side of Somerville from Assembly Square. In fact, its back is up against a Cambridge wall, on the side of a small-scale mall that has flourished in large part because of a subway station added here in the 1980s. And it’s right next to what is surely one of the busiest parking lots in the area, which is always something of a hazard to cross on foot if I’m trying to take the shortest distance to the station while rushing to catch a commuter train. Even in progressive, transit-conscious Somerville and Cambridge, car culture still feels very dominant at those moments, with trains and subways only a partial, problematic response to what often feels like an insatiable shared need for mobility. And the pretty panel on the wall of the mall seems likely to create, at best, only a tiny blip in the collective consciousness about how we got to this state and how we might get out of it again.

RIP the Greenfield Visitor Center

2010-01-27T14:11:00.000-08:00

Back in the summer, I wrote a post about the Pioneer Valley Visitor Center in Greenfield as a potentially interesting ethnographic site--halfway between the "non-place" of a highway rest stop and the place-saturation of a local tourist info booth.

Well, it turns out that the 10-year-old Visitor Center is due to close on February 1, a casualty of the state's budget crisis. The facility costs about $130,000 a year to maintain, and about half of that has come from state funding which has now been cut. The Franklin County Chamber of Commerce, which picks up the rest of the tab, can't afford to pay the full amount, and in fact Chamber director Ann Hamilton estimates that the operation has run at a deficit of more than half a million dollars over the ten years that it's been in existence.

So it looks as though there will be no more Visitor-Center-brand jam or coffee beans in the foreseeable future--and no more surveying of vehicular visitors as I was doing this summer and fall. Chamber director Hamilton noted last spring that it was difficult to quantify the impact of tourism in Franklin County, because so much of it is in the form of hybrid kinds of travel, like parents visiting their children at the area's many boarding schools and colleges. That was certainly borne out by my interviewing--it seemed as though the majority of the people I spoke with were on family visits of one sort or another. The Visitor Center seemed appropriate to those hybrid road trips, creating a bit of "hereness" in its strangely out-of-the-way location. I'll have to think of whether there's another spot on Route 2 that will offer such a useful place for talking with drivers--methodologically tricky if you don't happen to be in the car with them!

Riding the post-real railroad

2009-08-07T06:55:00.000-07:00

Although this blog is supposed to be about cars and heritage, I seem to keep stubbing my toes on railroads as I’m thinking about heritage and automobility. In an earlier post, I wrote about the divergence of tourist railroads and “real” ones, and about my hope that they might yet converge again in a mode of transport that is more present-oriented, as a viable alternative to automotive travel. That seems to be starting to happen on at least one heritage railroad line, according to an article in the most recent bulletin of the National Biodiesel Board, and it’s raising some questions for me as I ponder just what is emerging or converging here.

The Strasburg Rail Road of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, which one commentator has called the granddaddy of U.S. tourist lines, recently pulled a 27,000 gallon tank car filled with biodiesel—about four tractor-trailer loads’ worth—over a short run for regional energy supplier Amerigreen, which will use it to supply its network of retailers who sell it in home heating oil and fuel for vehicles like my own diesel Jetta. Hauling freight isn’t a new venture for the tourist railroad, which has been very savvy about diversifying its business as a way of keeping itself going (the then-century-old Strasburg Rail Road found a new lease on life as a tourist attraction in 1958, and has successfully branched into locomotive restoration, parts fabrication, upscale wining and dining, and other activities in recent years).

The presence of the biodiesel tanker on the tourist route creates heartening resonances. Alongside the valuing of Lancaster County’s rural landscape for its scenic beauty is the idea that we ought to be turning toward “greener” kinds of energy for a whole host of good reasons, something that is echoed in Amerigreen’s own focus on renewable fuels and its new “100% American Fuel” campaign, which buys petroleum only from North American sources in a kind of attempt at relocalizing the oil economy (Pennsylvania’s own oil production apparently doesn’t factor into its supply, being more suited to specialized uses than to heating and vehicle fuel). And it seems that the people involved are picking up on those resonances. Dave Hessen of Amerigreen, describing the run to me, noted, “It was a beautiful day, and it was great to see the tank car coming in through the farm fields.” His comment evoked the greenness of the fuel, the landscape, and the mode of transport, all of which are easier to see and celebrate within the context of the old-fashioned train line and the pastoral setting in which it operates. You could make a case that this represents what things might look like if we came to our collective senses and started building more diverse, environmentally responsible, and regionally-oriented systems of energy production and delivery.

I think there’s something more complicated going on, though, and it has to do with where tourism fits in all of this. Rather than just being one layer of the overall scene, it seems to me that tourism actually permeates almost all the layers, from the promotional advantage being seized by the National Biodiesel Board and Amerigreen to the carefully-negotiated balance that the area's Amish farmers have developed with curious outsiders. The Lancaster Farmland Trust, which partners with the Strasburg Rail Road, emphasizes heritage in its mission, and the railroad itself, while seemingly driven by its organizers’ desire to see the old trains and the craft knowledge embodied in them survive, has embraced tourism (and its central value of authenticity) as a primary strategy to ensure that survival. The tale of the biodiesel tanker on the tourist railroad suggests to me that tourism—the marketing and consumption of places and experiences—has indeed become ubiquitous in contemporary cultural production.

So this seems like more than just a harbinger of a possible change in direction from an oil-powered, car-centric society to a greener, more local one. At every step of the way, for better and worse, we’re likely to see producers and consumers approaching what they’re doing in a touristic way, with an understanding of landscapes and experiences—from plowing fields to hauling fuel to riding a train—deeply conditioned by the expectations and promotional tactics of tourism. Culture and energy use are fundamentally entwined, and our culture is increasingly a touristic one.

The “worse” part of this equation would be that events like the tanker run become purely symbolic public relations statements or experiences to be consumed like a new wine to be sampled on one of the Strasburg Rail Road’s popular wine-tasting tours. A more positive interpretation—the one that Dean MacCannell was originally imagining when he wrote The Tourist back in 1976—is that we’ve created a touristic culture where both production and consumption are more fully participatory and able to incorporate radically new visions of what our lives might be. If the lines have irreversibly blurred between the real and the “not-real”—if we have in fact entered a kind of “post-real” culture where this distinction has become largely moot—then it probably behooves all of us to enter intelligently into the marketing of places and experiences, and to use the ubiquitous tools of publicity to delineate the kind of society that we most want to see.

"Driven to the Past" keynote address

2009-07-14T05:18:00.000-07:00

I've posted a web version of my recent keynote address at the Mass. History Conference, held in Worcester on June 8, on my website. The theme of the conference was "With Power for All: Energy and Social Change in Massachusetts."

Chinese bike, Canadian rider - Happy Fourth of July!

2009-07-04T18:31:00.000-07:00

Yes, Bertha the e-bike and I were in the Petersham Fourth of July parade, assisting the town energy committee by pulling an "insulated house" (there was also a windmill on wheels, a battery-powered lawnmower, miscellaneous big puppets, two other electric bikes and a non-electric one, and a small fleet of Priuses). Larry Buell of Earthlands was also there, in his living history persona as Lucius Spooner, a 19th-century Petersham farmer. Old green meets new green!

2009-07-03T16:07:00.000-07:00

I went out today to start beta-testing some surveys that I want to use with motorists at tourist sites, and decided that I would begin at the Upper Pioneer Valley Visitor Information Center in Greenfield, MA. This facility has been open for about a decade, and I've read about it off and on in the Greenfield paper, but this is the first time I've actually been in there. It's a bit tricky to find - you have to get off Interstate 91 or Route 2 (whichever of the nearby big roads you happen to be travelling on), get onto Route 2A, keep a sharp eye out for signs (the main directional sign is partly obscured by a "Left Lane Must Turn Left" sign), then take a smaller side road, sidestep an Applebee's Restaurant, and resist the impulse to turn into a motel parking lot.

Unlike most roadside rest areas, this one - once you manage to find it - has a decidedly local flavor, which is explained in part by the fact that it's funded by the state but operated by the Franklin County Chamber of Commerce. It's a showcase for beautiful local crafts, and was conceived very much as a gateway point for the local area as much as a pitstop for those on the big roads. Route 2 (a.k.a. the Mohawk Trail), which stubbornly remains two lanes wide west of my own town of Athol, is another reason for this flavor; the visitor center was purposely not sited on Interstate 91 itself so that the Route 2 traffic, especially the fall leaf-peepers, would be more easily able to access it. One motorist was complaining at considerable length to the manager this afternoon about the obscure location and limited hours (it's open 362 days a year, but closes at 5 p.m. every day), but all the other visitors I saw there spent quite a lot of time browsing the shelves and apparently enjoying the ambience.

It occurred to me, in fact, that this facility itself might make a useful entry-point for some ethnographic inquiry. The site seems to challenge the usual "convenience is paramount" model for the roadside rest stop, and to insert some insistent localness (in the form of the somewhat convoluted access route and orientation to Route 2, as well as in its emphasis on local items for sale) into the highway experience. I was talking to people today about their general enjoyment (or otherwise) of the driving experience, and a bit about how fuel prices and other modes of transportation factored (or not) into their decisions about how they were getting to where they were going. There weren't any big surprises in what I was hearing (people really like driving!) but I wonder if asking them about finding the Greenfield Visitor Center might tease out some opinions about the interface between the usual seamlessness of high-speed motor travel and the localness of this site.

Lost in the brand

2009-06-30T05:10:00.000-07:00

I was going to write a somewhat straightforward post about a Merecedes-Benz ad that I happened to catch on television this weekend (an unusual event as I very seldom watch TV). The ad alternates shots of people looking at old Mercedes E-class cars in the Mercedes-Benz Museum near Stuttgart with the usual footage of a gleaming new car careening around curves and over hills ("Professional driver on closed road--do not attempt at home"). At the end of the ad, the new car smashes through a glass wall of the museum and "takes its rightful place," as the narration puts it, along with its automotive ancestors.

According to a recent New York Times article, Mercedes' overall sales have fallen almost 30% over the past year, with its U.S. market taking the deepest plunge. But the company has decided that there's no mileage to be gotten from promoting efficiency and affordability as most other carmakers are curently doing. Instead, it's hyping its distinguished lineage and enduring association with luxury and innovative design, an association very much reflected in its sleek museum, designed by Amsterdam's UNStudio and opened in 2006. My original post was going to be about how interesting it was to see a company weaving its own heritage production and celebration into its advertising.

But it gets more interesting yet. In poking around looking for links for the post, I discovered that the museum's current exhibit just happens to be called "Evolution of the E-Class." So the ad is really an outlying piece of the exhibit, making the explicit connection between advertising the product and preserving/continuing the lineage. This didn't really surprise me--corporate and industry museums have always been about self-promotion, and lately we've seen a rash of high-profile new corporate museums being built or re-built. (These include the New World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta, which opened in 2007 in Atlanta, Harley Davidson's flashy new Milwaukee museum in 2008, which I wrote about in an earlier post, and The Hershey Story, replacing the old Hershey Museum this past year, not to mention the Henry Ford complex in Michigan, now re-branded as The Henry Ford. Meanwhile, Wells-Fargo has steadily built a network of museums, now numbering nine, which may continue to expand as the bank absorbs other institutions around the country.)

What startled me when I made the link between the museum exhibit and the Mercedes ad was the sense that a production like this seems to have achieved utter seamlessness among design, exhibitry, promotion, product, media, and image--a state of perfect brandedness where all roads lead to the same place, and that place is all about buying and selling. Again, the basic dynamic isn't new, but this seems particularly well-integrated and far-reaching. From the museum's slick website (with its elaboration of the Mercedes-Benz "myth" but without any mention of Germany's two 20th century world wars, let alone the company's use of slave labor from concentration camps during the second one) to the book and movie tie-ins (check out the inclusion of Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones's sunglasses from Men in Black 2, which featured a flying E-Class Mercedes-Benz) to the television ad campaign to the sexy museum building itself, there's a sense of control and hyper-coordination that leaves me feeling a bit short of breath, and not in a good sense.

The "fourth wall" is being broken in this ad, with the new car rushing into the museum. But the wall is breaking inward, into the over-determined territory of the brand rather than outward into any kind of messier or more participatory cultural production. Any musealogical reflection taking place here is strictly the kind that results from gazing at a shiny surface, self-referential and self-serving. (See, this is why I usually don't watch TV!)

Both vintage and viable

2009-06-18T04:45:00.000-07:00

The places and activities I'm most fascinated by are the ones where the relationship between the past and present is unstable and up for grabs. This past week, as I was taking the train up to Canada and back for a family visit, it occurred to me that trains fall into that category--increasingly so, as more tourist railroad routes are developed and as more people are riding trains as an everyday alternative to cars. (While it's true that car use in the U.S. is increasing--it grew 21% between 1995 and 2008--public transportation use actually grew 38% in the same period, while the overall U.S. population grew just 14%, according to the 2009 Fact Book of the American Public Transportation Association [p. 11])

So it was interesting, as I was clickety-clacking my way across New York state on the "Maple Leaf" train, to see the current issue of Amtrak's "New York by Rail" magazine also noting the way that train travel seems to go in two directions at once. "Rail journeys on Amtrak are great for whisking you effortlessly from point A to point B," the magazine says in a page about "Scenic Railroads." That is, trains are an everyday, consequential mode of travel (and maybe close to an ideal one in many ways, combining high degrees of relative mobility, comfort, and accessibility). But our shift into automobility in the early 20th century marooned many passenger and freight routes in the past, where many of them have been re-framed as heritage. The magazine goes on, "Tourist railroads, on the other hand, offer a slower-paced journey specifically intended to bring you close to scenic vistas and historic sites." The article points out the appeal of vintage rolling stock, refurbished depots, historic locomotives, and rail museums along the many tourist railroad routes in New York.

As I noted in an earlier post about Pennsylvania's oil heritage area, these tourist railroads are deeply and somewhat weirdly entangled in car culture, since the usual pattern is to drive to the station, take the train, and then drive away again. Tourist trains don't go from Point A to Point B--they go from Point A to Point A, in a self-referential loop rather than a consequential journey. But they do hold something in public memory of the earlier extent of American rail networks, and in a time when we may actually be moving in that direction again, these symbolic journeys exist on the unstable edge of the past/present relationship rather than simply as nostalgic representations of the obsolete. We can hope.

The Amtrak route across New York offers plenty of opportunities to contemplate the shifting relationship among different modes of transportation. At various places, particularly where the Mohawk Valley narrows, you can sit on the train and see the Mohawk River, the Erie Canal that parallels it (the straighter, lighter-green band), and roads large and small, including of course the New York State Thruway (Interstate 90 on the map). The image above shows all of these sharing space in the valley just west of Canajoharie, in the same neck of the woods as the early 20th century postcard at the top of this post. (The railroad tracks are the light gray line just below NY Route 5.)

Pilgrims and Progress (on Petroleum)

2009-06-09T07:13:00.001-07:00

A dark and rainy day it is for the launch of a cross-country centennial reenactment of Alice Ramsey's 41-day drive across the U.S. in a 1909 Maxwell touring car. Ramsey was a 22-year-old Vassar graduate and avocational car racer who undertook the 3,800 mile trip in part to prove that a woman was capable of matching the feat already accomplished by numerous men in the previous six years and in part as a publicity campaign for the Maxwell car company (which was subsumed in the Chrysler company in the 1920s). A real-life version of the plucky girl motorists whose adventures formed the basis of a sub-genre of kidlit in the early 20th century, Ramsey lived until 1983, and published her own narrative about her trip, called "Veil, Duster, and Tire Iron," in 1961.

The centennial project was initiated by an antique car buff from Washington State, Dr. Richard Anderson, who recruited his daughter Emily to take the role of Alice Ramsey in the cross-country drive. The route will largely follow the 1909 itinerary, with due alterations for changes in the road system and without the hazards of the unpaved roads of early 20th century America (as seen above). Part of this route follows what would become, in 1913, the Lincoln Highway, a kind of prototype for the later Interstate system. (Click here for the original Lincoln Highway route. The Lincoln Highway Association's own annual conference in South Bend, Indiana will be a stop on the Ramsey/Anderson trip.)

All of this gives me lots of food for thought, too much for a single blog post. As my colleague David Glassberg put it yesterday in discussion about automobility and heritage at the Mass. History Conference, "the auto is deeply woven into the DNA of historic sites" because road-building, automobile-promotion, and way-marking projects have so often overlapped with each other, right from the earliest days of the car. It's a process that continues in the heritage area movement, which ties whole regions together thematically and creates auto, bike, boat, and pedestrian routes through them. This is a history I hope to be exploring more deeply as I get further into my cars and heritage research.

On this rainy Tuesday morning, though, what I'm mostly thinking about is how the symbolic resonance of the journey reflects various human conceptions of progress and achievement, whether that means escaping the cycle of reincarnation, visiting the axis mundi, becoming the first woman to cross a continent by car, or overcoming cancer. This notion of moving toward something better or more transcendent is of course the basis for pilgrimage, which has a very long history. Theoretically, the liminal qualities of movement and travel always open up some space for reflection and some potential for transformation. It's surely no coincidence that Emily Anderson, who is taking the role of Alice Ramsey in the centennial journey, is a professional event manager for a company that designs fundraising walks and other events for non-profit organizations (for example, three-day breast cancer walks).

So how do we understand a pilgrimage in a petroleum-powered car at a time when you can make a case that the resonance of both cars and petroleum is tinged with as much gloom as hope? There are lots of indications that the Ramsey reenactment crew is thinking about transformation on both personal and social levels (Emily Anderson chose Women for Women International as the beneficiary of any proceeds from the drive, making the connection between the mobility and opportunities open to some women but closed to others). But there's no sign that the project is encouraging anyone to think about transforming our automobile or petroleum use, which makes me suspect that this may be another of those efforts, like the Sharon Welcome Center in Vermont, that promotes positive social change in one direction while masking its own close ties to a culture of automobility that continues to have less-than-positive social and environmental implications. This seems to be another way of "progressing" (literally and symbolically) without necessarily questioning the costs of the "progress" we've already made.

I may be wrong about the potential for reflection on all of this in the Ramsey re-creation, and maybe it's just the gloom of the dark morning that's getting to me! Surprising things can always happen on the road. As a reality check, though, I just want to note another news story today: a long-awaited resolution in a legal case against Shell Oil for its complicity in the 1995 execution of Ogoni activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others who were protesting the environmental degradation caused by the operation of foreign oil companies in the Niger delta. Shell agreed to a $15.5 million settlement, a mere drop of its overall profits but an important precedent for human rights groups looking for ways to hold multinational corporations accountable. $5 million of the settlement will be used to set up an educational foundation in the delta region. In the Gokana language spoken by the Ogoni, the name of the trust, Kiisi, means "progress."

Parking on the past

2009-05-25T11:47:00.000-07:00

I'm always fascinated by debates over what gets defined as "history" or "heritage." In Greenfield, Massachusetts, not far from where I live, there's a mild kerfuffle currently taking place about the fate of a one-story building long associated with the automotive business. It's not clear from an April 7, 2009 Greenfield Recorder story what its original purpose was when it was built in the 1920s; it looks to me as though it might have been an auto showroom at one point, but that's just guesswork. It was a service garage from 1931 to 1940, then an auto parts store until 2006. "There's no value in the building," the Recorder quotes GRA chair (and current mayoral candidate) William Martin as saying. "It's all in the land." The Historical Commission disagrees: "This building is part of Greenfield's transportation history," according to commission chair Marcia Starkey, who describes the little brick and concrete building as "an architecturally fine surviving example of Greenfield's classic garages of the 1920s and 1930s."

The GRA wants to raze the structure to build--you guessed it--a parking garage. The Olive Street site is in a part of town that is seen as crucial to downtown redevelopment plans, right around the corner from the striking buildings of Bank Row (pictured at left), which perennially seem to be inching their way back to occupancy. A renovation of county courthouse facilities, mixed-use office and retail space, and a kind of cultural zone centering around the Garden Cinema are among the plans for this block, while the locavore restaurant Hope and Olive (née The Bottle of Bread, from Shelburne Falls) anchors its southeast corner. One end of Olive Street (almost) connects this part of town to the wonderful Greenfield Energy Park, a project of the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association that showcases renewable energy technology along with the history of the town's transportation (and especially railroad) history. The lot directly across from the 1920s garage is slated to become an intermodal transportation center, and perhaps even a railway station if passenger rail ever returns to Greenfield. Interestingly, there's another empty car-related building on that lot at present--the former home of Greenfield Toyota, which has moved up to Main Street and is currently bunking with a Ford dealership while constructing its own new home.

I've been trying to figure out what I think about all of this. On the one hand, sweeping away a couple of relics of the car age--the 1920s building and its much more recent counterpart across the street--in order to create a more concentrated mixed-use downtown area with access to non-automotive modes of transportation seems like a terrific thing. And you can make a case that the Historical Commission's claims of architectural distinction are a bit of a stretch. But their larger point is a good one: something is lost from collective memory if the evidence of the longer span of car culture disappears from the municipal landscape. This seems particularly likely to be the case if the site is simply turned into a parking garage to service the cars that we still have such a very hard time managing without.

NESEA has done an exemplary job of making the Energy Park into a lively site for contemplating past, present, and possible futures, and many of the technological and spatial links among them. It would be great to see the town of Greenfield somehow do the same thing with this site, maybe by building a parking garage that references the 1920s garage and uses it as part of the ongoing civic conversation about transportation, localness, mobility, and the uses of public space. The Historical Commission has talked about perhaps using the facade or some design elements from the old building in the new parking garage. Many of these "facadectomies" can be less than compelling (here's a classic example) but it seems that there might actually be some interesting resonances in this case. 'Twould make an intriguing public history thesis project for someone to propose a design that would not only keep the old building from being erased entirely, but incorporate some of its possible meanings into the redesign and reinvigoration of this part of Greenfield.

One if by car, two if by SUV

2009-04-18T16:52:00.000-07:00

Well, I’m back. Not that I’ve been anywhere terrifically exciting—just so busy teaching that I haven’t had time to work on my cars and heritage project. But now that the semester is starting to slow down, I’ll be able to hit the road again and have some fun with this. (Not that teaching isn’t fun, but…you know…)

I went to Minute Man National Historical Park today (107 miles, round trip) for part of the Patriots Day weekend festivities. I spent some time following Revolutionary War reenactors around at Minute Man about ten years ago, and they were certainly out in force today, colorful and eye-catching as always. However, I’m working on re-focusing my ethnographic gaze on cars and car-related infrastructure at historic sites, which is surprisingly hard to do (especially when the British are coming) but which starts to reveal some interesting new layers if you can do it.

Minute Man NHS is a particularly rich site for thinking about this, because in some ways it’s all about cars, and our struggle with cars. It’s celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, but the idea of creating a national park along a long stretch of preserved land following the line of the British retreat in 1775 actually dates back to the 1920s, when a prominent Boston landscape architect, Arthur Shurcliff (left), proposed it. Shurcliff was an amazingly prolific designer who worked on gardens, campuses, parks, and historic environments at Colonial Williamsburg, Mt. Holyoke College, the Quabbin Reservoir, parts of Frederick Law Olmsted’s “Emerald Necklace” (Shurcliff worked for Olmsted’s firm in Brookline), the Paul Revere Mall, the grounds of Plymouth Rock, and many other iconic places, trying to resolve the old nature/culture, city/garden tensions in a pleasing way.

Shurcliff, and the preservationists who shared his values and made use of his ideas, worried about development, traffic, and what a 1956 report called “mundane and disrespectful uses” of the sacred ground of the Battle Road. Long story short, the park as created in 1959 was based on a plan, which has since been almost entirely realized, to “restore” the landscape to something close to its 1775 condition, with rolling fields, stone walls, and a dirt road where there once was blacktop.

This feat of restoration has required many decades, the deaths of life-tenants in park properties, and recurring tussles with the adjacent Hanscom Air Force Base and other neighbors who would like to see more development of the very desirable real estate along the Route 128 corridor that rings Boston. You can still see glimpses of the old paved road within the park, if you look for it. And if you follow the restored road all the way to its end at Fiske Hill in Lexington, you can certainly hear evidence—via the noise of the eight-lane highway right around the corner—of the manic automobility that the park’s creators were reacting against.

And when the park hosts a big event, like today’s encounter between the redcoats and the Yankees along the Battle Road, you get a sense of just how hard it is to reclaim a road from automobiles in a place where most people are reliant on them. Parking is always a huge issue when there’s a crowd at Minute Man, and today’s plan involved many, many park rangers and police from the Middlesex Sheriff’s office (volunteering their time, I was told) and the takeover of an almost mile-long stretch of the Hanscom Airport Road for parking.

I need to figure out a good way to talk to visitors at sites like this about how driving to and from events like this fits within the larger heritage experience, and also to find out how people feel about the shift from being in the car to walking in the woods or whatever historic environment they end up in. There are such similarities between these environments and college campuses, “natural” parks, botanical gardens, and the other kinds of car-free places that Arthur Shurcliff designed so many of. They all promise an experience of a different pace and beautiful things to look at—once you’ve negotiated the hassle of getting there and finding a place to park.

2008-10-20T17:32:00.000-07:00

A few post-road-trip thoughts:

Driving across Pennsylvania yesterday, I kept seeing these billboards. The logic is a little shaky--it's like saying, "Without bullets, guns wouldn't be able to hit anything"! True enough, but it sidesteps the point of whether you think guns are good, bad, or some mixture of the two. It turns out the billboards are funded by F.O.R.C.E.--what seems to be an "astroturf" coal industry group masquerading as "Families Organized to Represent the Coal Economy." Fossil fuels fight back, although not without those who are questioning and opposing the organization.

My e-bike battery is charged and I'm planning to take my first road trip on the bike tomorrow.

My fuel economy on the trip back was fantastic. Somehow my inner speedometer has finally re-set itself to 55 mph. It was a whole lot less stressful to be the slowest thing on the road--you don't have to participate in nearly as much of the frenetic highway driving that way!

And I've posted a larger album of photographs from the oil museums and other sites here.

Emlenton (continued): After oil

2008-10-16T18:29:00.000-07:00

The final piece of my oil trip was a visit to the Pumping Jack Museum in Emlenton. This offered an interesting “middle way” between the Drake Well’s largely unreflexive exhibits and the Venango Museum’s sharp critical look at oil. “Industrial progress has a way of leaving a clean sweep in its wake,” the Pumping Jack’s website notes thoughtfully. “Sometimes it creates ghost towns, other times it expands over the ashes of its origins. Rarely does a small community retain many vestiges of its vital past, while still remaining alive and well - and small. Emlenton has been unique in the important part it played in early Oil & Gas - without ever really booming - or busting!”

I’m not so convinced that Emlenton has escaped the boom-and-bust cycle of industrialism, but it’s heartening to find a small museum reflecting on its setting and its place in that larger cycle. In an interesting example of adaptive reuse, the museum is located in a former school, along with a day care center, some judicial and municipal offices, and a small restaurant, the Oil Rig Lunch Depot.

The Oil Heritage Region has identified Emlenton as the southern gateway to the oil region, and the entryway and one hallway of the school are lined with professionally-produced exhibits about the town and oil—one side devoted to “Black Gold” (oil) and the other to the “Blue River” (the Allegheny).

The Pumping Jack Museum itself occupies one former classroom, and is essentially a local history museum created from artifacts and information provided by interested residents and friends. I got a soup-to-nuts tour of the exhibits courtesy of museum board member Dick Carr, a retired chemical engineer with deep roots in Emlenton (his father-in-law, also an area native, taught him physics and chemistry in this very school, helping to prompt his later career choice). After working for Standard Oil in New Jersey, Dick returned to Emlenton to run a small company in his home town. He told me about the demolition in the 1990s of the former Quaker State plant upriver from the town, on a site that is currently undergoing an environmental assessment and being considered for a riverfront trail. He also noted that the world’s oldest oil well still producing at its original depth (1867/891 feet) is located in nearby Mineral Springs park; the museum and heritage area worked with the municipality, which actually owns the well, to get it started again this year, and there are hopes of building a Drake-Well-style reproduction structure over it in time for the 150th anniversary celebration next year. (An article about this can be found on pp. 2 and 4 of this recent issue of the Oil 150 newsletter). The municipality actually earns a tiny royalty from this, but its real value to the town is clearly as heritage.

And that’s pretty much my oil sojourn, as I’ve now reached Pittsburgh where I’m attending a board meeting of the National Council of Public History in conjunction with a conference of the Oral History Association. My hotel room window looks out on the confluence of the Monongahela River with the Allegheny, which I’ve been following for much of this trip. There’s plenty of evidence of Pittsburgh’s turn to culture-based redevelopment after the decline of all those ferrous and fossil sources of Pennsylvanian wealth (coal, iron, steel, oil)—the fleet of riverboats just outside the hotel, the pink fountain in Point State Park at the V where the rivers meet (pink, I’m assuming, because of something to do with breast cancer research), and the inevitable waterfront area redevelopments, including the Station Square area where my hotel is (a "playground of historical proportions," according to its website), the Carnegie Science Center, and Heinz Field, home of the Pittsburgh Steelers, with its prominently-displayed ketchup logo.

And there are the cars—speeding or creeping across the bridges, emptying out the city at rush hour and creating a rush of sound at all hours. Unless the train buffs are successful in restoring enough of the rail infrastructure to make tourist excursions to the north country feasible again on a large scale, all of these oil heritage projects remain dependent on automobility (including the use of cars to carry bicycles and kayaks so visitors can access the rivers and the trails made from former railroad beds). It’s an economy with its own logic and its own momentum, and my sense is that it hasn’t fully taken hold yet in Pennsylvania’s oil country. It will be worth watching to see whether oil’s sesquicentennial next year changes that in any substantial way, and what happens with all of this in response to whatever fluctuations in oil prices (whether up or down) we see in the near future. And it will also be worth watching to see if any of the oil heritage sites do make connections with conversations about a possibly less oil-dependent future. When I asked Dick Carr if that was happening at the Pumping Jack Museum, he said, “Well, everybody’s thinking about it, of course, but we haven’t had any conversations about it here yet.” The word yet makes me cautiously optimistic about the future of oil’s past.

Emlenton: Under the Interstate

2008-10-16T06:27:00.000-07:00

So tonight I’m in Emlenton, in a bed and breakfast inn right on the Allegheny River. By far the tallest thing in Emlenton is the I80 bridge that crosses the river just downstream from the B&B; I can see it up in the sky when I look out the window. There’s a great deal of truck traffic charging back and forth across it—the new version of the railroad that opened up this part of Pennsylvania in the 1860’s.

I’m going to look at Emlenton more closely tomorrow, but one interesting thing did strike me about it this evening when I was taking a brief walk by the river on my way to look for some dinner. The town has been severely plaqued—that is, there are heritage plaques all over the place, and one of them, next to the river, actually commemorates the four hotels that once lined the riverbank not far from where I’m staying. Emlenton doesn’t have a once-grand downtown like Titusville or Oil City, or the distinction of being the firstest or the mostest at anything, but it does appear to be determinedly marketing its heritage nonetheless, and one of the things it’s marketing is its own former history as a little river resort town and transportation hub.

This reminds me of John Sears’s good discussion in Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (University of Massachusetts Press, 1989) about how Mauck Chunk, Pennsylvania (now renamed Jim Thorpe) developed simultaneously as a coal terminus and a tourist destination, and for many of the same reasons—mountains, river, trains, people’s curiosity about the marvels of a young and flourishing industry. Interesting to see tourism itself being folded into the heritage mix.

Oil City: Oil on the Brain

2008-10-16T05:42:00.000-07:00

From Titusville, I drove down to Oil City, resisting the temptation to drive into Oil Creek State Park (maybe on the next trip) or to take a detour farther east and visit the site of the vanished boomtown of Pithole, which went from being an isolated farm to a town of 15,000 people to being virtually abandoned when the oil ran out, all in the space of a few years. Instead, I set my sights on the Venango Museum of Art, Science and Industry in Oil City, and was rewarded by as provocative an exhibit on oil as I could have wished to see.

This county-run museum is housed in the old post office, a wonderful high-ceilinged place that is, inevitably, enormously expensive to heat and cool, according to the director, Betsy Kellner. (They do have some conservation measures in place—interior storm windows and a new furnace—but inheriting the mixed blessing/burden of this carbon-age structure does seem appropriate for a museum that is trying to pose some pointed questions about our carbon dependency!)

The permanent exhibit, installed in the mid-1990s, is called “Oil: Black Gold or Black Magic?” It’s a beautifully done professonal exhibit, with some pieces of vernacular local memory woven into it in more or less successful ways—an extensively, fully-restored theater organ from Oil City’s stunning Latonia Theater, allusions to native son “Rattlesnake Pete,” an entrepreneur and healer who opened the town’s first museum in the 1890s, an area showcasing local oil brands and products, and a meeting/performance space where temporary exhibits are hung (currently, a show of photographs of remnants of the older oil industry in the area).

Kellner told me that when the museum was first established, in the 1980s and early 90s, the exhibitry had been all temporary and focused on subjects deemed to be of local interest. “But when tourists would come here, they told us they wanted the museum to be about oil,” she said--in other words, oil is Oil City's brand, and that's why tourists came to the museum. With foundation and public funding (much of it via the Oil Heritage Region), the museum had Boston-based Christopher Chadbourne & Associates design a permanent exhibit all about oil.

While there’s some local history here, the main thrust of the exhibit is to expose the taken-for-granted ways that oil has come to permeate modern societies. There’s a wonderful section on plastics (including a 15-minute “Clueless” style video called “Fuel-less”), a graphic representation of who the world’s main producers and consumers of oil are (the U.S. actually produced nine million barrels of oil a day in 2001, but consumed twenty million), and a substantial area devoted to automobility, including a comparison of urban and suburband spatial patterns and how the latter have been shaped—unhealthily—by the car. One exhibit panel asks visitors, "How much oil do you use?" (Americans use an average of three gallons a day, all told, it turns out).
While acknowledging the productive and appealing aspects of the oil economy (for example, the "Society of the Road" section admits that "The road trip has become a classic element of American culture"--so this trip of mine is classic, not merely self-indulgent!), the exhibit pulls no punches when it comes to connecting the dots between oil and its many less desirable consequences: conflict of various kinds, environmental degradation, social disconnections, and so on. I didn't spot the actual terms "peak oil" or "climate change" anywhere (even a decade ago, when the exhibit was mounted, these weren't as common currency as they are now) but the underlying ideas are very present here.

It’s a terrific exhibit, and of course my big question about it is whether visitors are using it in critical or consequential ways. Kellner reported that their school audiences often seemed enlightened or provoked, particularly by the plastics section. (One boy, insisting that compact discs couldn’t possibly be made from oil, told her, “I’m going to have my father come down here and give you a talking-to!”) But it didn’t seem that the museum had any strong linkages with any post-carbon or peak-oil or relocalization kinds of discussions that may be going on in the region.

So the question there is whether this site is, like Lowell National Historical Park and other places that raise good questions about industrial capitalist society, a place where critical museal questioning is rather carefully enclaved away from any real-life applications of the knowledge that is so compellingly on display here. The Venango Museum isn’t as beholden to either local memory or local industry as the Drake Well and many other industrial history sites, and that has given it a freedom to create an exhibit that puts local memory and industry into a much broader context. But does it follow the usual pattern of contextualizing without making actual social connections to groups and people who are working on the issues the museum represents? More research would tell… There's certainly the potential here for some productive linkages with consequential present-day efforts.

A clock outside the Oil City Library proclaims the city to be “The Hub of Oildom” and “Gushing with Pride,” but it’s clear that the loss of industry here is very much an ongoing process, and that the city is still struggling to cope. Population continues to drop, and the big Pennzoil refinery plant north of downtown was demolished about five years ago. Quaker Oil was bought by Shell in 2002, and its operations were subsequently shifted to Houston, continuing the now almost century-old pattern of northeastern American industry moving south and away. A recent edition of a booklet called "Oil City: The Town That Grew Up With Oil," sold in the Venango Museum shop, is book-ended by addenda detailing these and other losses since the booklet was first produced in 1989, leading one to wonder whether Oil City is also likely, eventually, to die with oil.

The city is actively courting artists at present (what deindustrialized town isn't courting artists?), with an active artist relocation program that includes technical assistance and financial incentives to move to Oil City. And this of course prompts my other big question about how much room there will continue to be for these things if that new economy either (a) takes off or (b) fails to take off! Where's that crystal ball when you really need it?

A footnote: A local high school band has made a recording of 1860s popular songs about the Pennsylvania oil boom, including an 1864 ditty called "Oil on the Brain" that is quoted at the beginning of the Venango Museum exhibit:

"Our stocks, like clocks, go with a spring,
Wind up, run down again:
But all our strikes are sure to cause,
'Oil on the Brain.'"

Oil’s axis mundi: Titusville

2008-10-16T04:48:00.000-07:00

I started my day yesterday in Titusville, home of the first oil discovery in the region (and the nation, and the world). It’s this anniversary that the oil and gas industry is celebrating next year with its “Oil 150” commemoration. The heritage signage seems geared more for people coming from the south than from the north, so I missed the Drake Well signs on my first pass through town, and fetched up at the Perry Street Station in a mob of tourists.

The mob turned out to be temporary, as the day’s train ride on the Oil Creek and Titusville Railroad was due to leave shortly and everyone but me seemed to be getting on board. I’ve often wondered what the economics of these train-and-trolley tourist ventures are—there are so many of them, and clearly they provide railroad enthusiasts with a reason to play with their great big toys, but I wonder if most of them manage to pay for themselves as well? However, despite the “modes of transportation” connection, I’m not here to think about trains. Armed with directions, I found the Drake Well on my second try.

This has the feel of an older local commemorative museum lightly overlaid with more recent professionalized historical interpretation. Ironically, the site is there largely because the early oil industry itself was so ephemeral. By the 1890s, all that remained of the original Drake Well site was a derelict pipe, and some preservation-minded local people feared that the knowledge of the location of this origin-point might be lost altogether. The property owner, the widow of an early oil explorer, donated the acre of land to a local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, who put up a sizeable plaque in 1914.

The American Petroleum Institute funded the upgrading of the site in time for the 75th anniversary of oil’s discovery, in 1934, at which point it became a state historic site. The state built a re-creation of Drake’s engine house and derrick, copied from a photograph, in 1945, and constructed a new and much larger limestone museum in 1964 to house its exhibits and its collections of materials donated by its friends in the industry.

There are references to all of these layers in the Drake Well’s interpretive landscape, making this quite a complex heritage palimpsest. The place comes up strikingly short on critical interpretation (the orientation film is a boosterish "look what oil has done for our world" production), and the woman in the gift shop seemed puzzled when I noted a couple of books for sale about peak oil and the politics of oil power and asked her whether the museum was part of any kind of discussion about those issues. The two exhibitionary moments that seemed to connect even remotely to real-world oil politics were in the entry lobby of the museum, where a bulletin board included a selection of editorial cartoons about oil prices and a group of labeled bottles offered visitors an opportunity to take a “sniff test” to compare the “nose” of crude from different parts of the world, including Venezuela, Iraq, Russia, and Canada, as well as such delicacies as whale and lard oil, for the sake of comparison.

The more salient set of meanings at the Drake Well was about technical knowledge, particularly as embodied in the operating equipment in the museum’s “back forty.” Out on the far reaches of the lawn, an incredible Rube Goldberg network of wires and pumps simulates a working oil field of yesteryear, all moving at a stately and deliberate pace and making a weird series of noises (the 20 horsepower gas engine coughs and wheezes, the unlubricated irod rods squeak in their rings, the hinges of the support mechanisms creak). Most heritage sites have these somewhat ghostly presences, for example in the form of video and audio recordings, but these ones seemed particularly numinous, like a machine whose original momentum hasn’t run down yet. I know there’s actually a lot of skill and labor that goes into keeping this stuff moving, particularly the big “hit or miss” engine, but that labor also has a ghostly quality to it, since the workers are (or at least they were today) pretty invisible, older guys retired from the declining-but-not-really-gone oil industry in the area. This is really a site dedicated to local memory, and it very much has that memorial quality to it.

Going, going, but not gone

2008-10-14T17:54:00.000-07:00

Having spent much of the morning acquiring my new e-bike (more on that below), I spent the afternoon driving past seasonally-closed oil museums and discovering that there is actually considerable oil and gas pumping and refining going on here in northwestern PA. I was also ogling fall foliage (there’s a lot of that here, too) and trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to convince myself to maintain a somewhat critical stance toward all this automobility.

I knew the oil museums were going to be closed, although I’d hoped to catch someone at the Pioneer Oil Museum in Bolivar, New York (that’s pronounced BALL-i-ver—“Home of the Deer and the Derrick,” it says on their welcome sign). I was there five years ago, and still have a souvenir bottle of light, sweet Pennsylvania crude that I bought there on my desk. Oil from this part of the country, it turns out, is of exceptionally high quality, and prized for various high-end and specialty uses. It is still pumped, and apparently becomes profitable again as extraction technology improves and whenever imported crude prices spike.

I didn’t realize, though, that the refining business was still so extensive in this part of the world. It’s obviously not the economic mainstay that it once was in places like Bradford and Warren, PA—these towns have all the hallmarks of economic decline and various attempts at revitalization. But there are still sizeable refineries in both places--the American Refining Group in Bradford, pictured below, and the United Refining Company in Warren, where I'm staying tonight. In fact, ARG is refining more petroleum from the Bradford oil field now than at any time in its history, according to its website. United refines about 70,000 barrels of Canadian crude oil a day under the Citgo brand, for distribution to convenience store gas stations.

What was more startling was to discover oil fields in the Allegeny (or Allegany, depending on which side of the NY/PA border you’re on) National Forest. Can you spot the pump in the forest in the image above? I kept driving past these and finally had to stop and tromp into the woods to get a better look. Lo and behold, the Bradford-based Minard Run Oil Company, which has been in existence since 1875, is developing the petroleum resources here, although the project has not been without controversy. It turns out that there’s been a kind of mini-oil boom going on in Pennsylvania in recent years, with 9,000 wells already pumping (almost 5,000 were drilled in 2006 alone) and another 2,000 expected to come online this year.

So the oil industry clearly isn’t gone from this region, and in fact high imported crude prices may help it to rebound somewhat. This raises some intriguing questions which I hope to be able to ponder as I move on tomorrow to the museums that are supposed to be open. Is oil actually leaving western New York and Pennsylvania, or is it here for the long term? If it’s really not leaving for the foreseeable future, how does that affect the usual dynamic of industrial history museums, which, in Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s formulation, are “instrumental in the foreclosing of what is shown”*? Are these, in fact, industrial history museums per se, or are they really industry museums, created to celebrate the achievements of local enterprise rather than to interpret it critically or in larger contexts? Is there any potential at these sites for a helpfully retrospective look at how we got so mired in black gold, or is that just wishful anthropological thinking on my part?

And is there a parallel here between an industry that is kind-of-going-but-by-no-means-gone and an oil-driven economy that we-kind-of-know-we-should-unplug-from-but-we’d-really-rather-not-have-to? Today’s drive really made me think about that last point. This is a very beautiful part of the country, and a very beautiful time of year. And I have to admit I really like going for long drives by myself, especially when there’s stunning scenery to look at.

Oh, and the e-bike. The story there is that a guy from Knoxville, PA (pop. approximately 600) went to China in pursuit of machinery that he wanted to sell for his seamless gutter and ductwork business, and he noticed that everybody seemed to be riding electric bicycles, which he’d never seen in the U.S. So now he has two businesses, Liberty Seamless Enterprises and Liberty Electric Bicycle Company.

I bonded with the bike about forty-five seconds into my test ride, and I would post a picture of it here except that at present it’s stuffed into the back seat of my car. (It looks a lot like the bike over the bar in the restaurant where I ate dinner in Warren, PA tonight, except that mine has a battery behind the seat post, it’s not festooned in electric lights, and it’s not pink.) There’s not a ton of room in the back seat of a Jetta, so as much as I’d like to get it out and ride it around some more, I don’t want to undo the work of the three helpful guys at Liberty who helped me wedge it in there.

I’m not complaining about the Jetta, though. We just turned 500 miles on this tank of fuel (about a 25/75 biodiesel/petrodiesel blend) and the gauge is still above a quarter of a tank. Jimmy Carter was right: slowing down to 55 mph does make a difference. It helps a bit to dispel my guilt-induced confusion about whether I should be wholeheartedly enjoying this road trip!

*Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 159.

The factories that aren't there

2008-10-14T09:29:00.000-07:00

I haven’t quite hit oil country yet, but as someone with a fascination for deindustrialized and postindustrial places, I wanted to mention my stop last night in Corning, New York, just north of the Pennsylvania border. The corporate headquarters of glass- and ceramic-maker Corning, Incorporated is still there, in a low, shiny, black, somewhat Darth-Vaderish complex along the waterfront. Also prominent is the Corning Museum of Glass, built in 1951 and expanded several times since then. Near the museum and corporate headquarters is Corning’s “Gaffer District” (a gaffer, in glass-blowing parlance, is the person who actually blows the glass), its version of the ubiquitous arts district in deindustrialized places.

And deindustrialized Corning definitely is. The helpful woman at the motel where I stayed told me she’s been watching industry leave the Chemung River Valley over the 20+ years she and her husband have run the motel. She added a phrase that didn’t seem to make sense at first: “If you go downtown and look along the riverbank, you’ll see all the factories that aren’t there anymore.” When I looked at the riverbank, though, I could see that her description actually seemed apt: the riverfront park really looks like a bright green scab over a fairly recent wound. It’s a nice space, especially at sunset, but it still looks very new and tender. There’s a clear feeling that the museums and arts district constitute the new industry in town, but as these kinds of redevelopments continue to proliferate and fuel prices remain high (although they’ve certainly dropped from the point they reached a few weeks ago), how robust are all these heritagized towns likely to become?

I’m posting this from Wellsville, New York, not far west of Corning, which also shows signs of a substantial investment in creative production and the arts. Lately I’ve been starting to wonder whether artists themselves may become a scarce resource at some point, or whether this is an endlessly self-reproducing sector!

Automotive link: Corning’s ceramics are important in the manufacture of catalytic converters for gasoline engines. (Test your knowledge of these handy devices here.) Corning is also apparently working on emissions control technology for diesel engines (so perhaps more of these will be able to pass muster in more U.S. states, giving us a more European-sized range of diesel passenger vehicles to choose from!)

You've got (really old) mail

2008-10-10T17:56:00.000-07:00

Today is the final day of another vehicular reenactment—a 24-day pilgrimage along the 2,800-mile route of the Butterfield Overland Mail from St. Louis to San Francisco. Wells Fargo’s extensive public history program has been sponsoring the rolling commemoration of the arrival of the first overland mail coach’s arrival in San Francisco in the small hours of October 10, 1858. In addition to its network of corporate museums, which stretches from Anchorage to Minnesota to San Diego, Wells Fargo maintains a fleet of reproduction stagecoaches that it considers its “living logos,” but for this trip, it supplied the curator of one of its nine museums with an RV from which he’s been blogging and vlogging his way across the western half of the country.

Founded in 1852, Wells Fargo has a particularly long corporate history to chronicle. It’s interesting to speculate about the intangible value of the Wells Fargo name (and heritage) in its acquisition in 1998 by Minnesota-based Norwest Corporation, which then took on the more famous name. To quote the New York Times on the merger, “No bank in America has a more storied history” (and am I the only one who thinks that the word “storied” is overdue for a rest? Ever since that storied franchise the Boston Red Sox won the 2004 World Series, I seem to be hearing it everywhere. And in this “historic” election and financial cycle, the word history itself has gotten similarly overworked, in this anthropologist’s humble opinion.)

If I’m sounding testy, it’s probably because I’m ready for a vacation—and in fact I’m hitting the road myself this coming week. Destination: oil heritage country in western New York and Pennsylvania. In case you didn’t realize it, that’s where this whole petroleum thing really got started. I’m not travelling in an RV, but lest fingers still point (“You said you were trying to find ways to use your car less!”), I should point out in return that despite the cooler weather, I’m using as high a proportion of biodiesel in my tank as I figure I can get away with. And my first tour stop is going to be Liberty e-Bikes in Knoxville, PA, to try to buy myself an electric bicycle.

But I realize it’s still problematic to drive for hundreds of miles to go and contemplate how we got so mired in a petroleum-driven economy. Heritage is full of interesting contradictions. Stay tuned.

Hog Heritage

2008-10-08T09:41:00.000-07:00

A recent LA Times article by motorcyclist and journalist Susan Carpenter notes that Harley-Davidson’s sales are down due to high fuel costs, and that this poses something of a dilemma for a brand built on power, noise, and a robust disdain for such bourgeois concerns as fuel economy.

Carpenter quotes Harley’s CEO, James Ziemer, as saying that owning a Harley is “not about transportation, it’s about an experience.” The selling of experience is nothing new in the vehicle industry—in Auto Mania: Cars, Consumers, and the Environment (Yale University Press, 2007, p. 79), Tom McCarthy notes that when the U.S. car market began to reach the saturation point of an average of one car per family in the mid-1920s, manufacturers turned to creating new models and brands which could be linked to differing social statuses and aspirations and promoted through the growing advertising industry. But what happens to a gas-guzzling brand when more and more people are seeking the experience of actually saving on fuel?

Rather disingenuously, Harley seems to be trying to have it both ways. On the one hand, it is promoting its smaller models, like the Sportster and the Buell Blast. But as Carpenter points out, giving in too much to demands for efficiency threatens to erode the core brand itself. Harley’s solution to this dilemma seems to be a turn toward more forceful marketing of its own heritage.

Take, for example, the current lead ad spot on Harley-Davidson’s website, which has also been popping up recently on Facebook and elsewhere. It reads:

America, please don't buy a Harley because it gets 50 mpg. Mpg describes riding like biology describes sex. History has shaped this tank, not the whims of foreign oil. Let's ride to parties like rock stars. Let's fill the tank that gives back more than we put in. So screw it, let's ride.

The implication, of course, is, “Do buy a Harley, because it gets 50 miles per gallon—isn’t that great?” (It doesn’t seem so impressive to someone whose diesel Jetta gets at least that, but that’s another story.) But having made that point, the ad then shifts to plausible deniability: only a limp-wristed foreigner would actually care about fuel economy. That’s not the reason to buy a Harley. It’s a classic heritage move—inviting us to experience the past (in this case, the pre-oil-worries, pre-climate-change past) from the perspective of a more comfortable, more advanced, or more responsible present, without really having to resolve the tensions or contradictions between them.

All of which leads me to think that Harley’s heritage turn is in fact fostering a type of historical reenactment, in which riding a hog becomes a conscious way of connecting to a lost or vanishing past when Detroit was dominant and Americans didn’t have to worry about miles per gallon. It strikes me, in fact, that this may be an early sign of the coming of a post-petroleum age. Archaic forms of transportation, like other aspects of culture, have always been “heritagized” when they’ve been superceded—think horse-and-buggy, steam boats and trains, trolley, or, more recently, Detroit muscle cars. Given that the time lag between original experience and heritage experience seems to be shorter and shorter in our “experience economy,” the official turn to Hog Heritage may be one more canary in the mine as Americans start to realizing that our petroleum-based way of life is likely to cave in on us sooner rather than later.

Harley-Davidson’s recently-opened corporate museum in Milwaukee is clearly designed to support this heritage move. In a post entitled “Some of our Best Exhibits are in the Parking Lot,", museum blogger Bill Rodencal describes how the museum was created with only a glass wall between the exhibit floor and the parking area, so that museum-goers' own bikes could be incorporated visually into the Harley heritage on display.

The current advertising campaign seems to break the “fourth wall” in much the same way, making Harley ownership into a “place to play” (one commenter on the blog post wrote, “H-D did not so much build a museum…[as] build a new club house we can all call home!”) that is strikingly reminiscent of the use of historic sites by military reenactors playing out their own visions of the martial past. I know that muscle car clubs et al. have been doing this for many years – but what seems new is the corporate involvement in pushing this heritagizing process along. Is Harley creating an imagined/remembered/fantasy space for Americans who know they need to wean themselves from oil but can’t quite let go of their own image of the country or themselves as they do it? Maybe this is a first unconscious step toward turning the ritualized weekend Hog club ride into the kind of transportation heritage display that we usually associate with draft horse pulls and Mississippi steamboat rides. As with all heritage, the question is whether this helps to facilitate a needed change or just slathers a layer of nostalgia over the bigger questions that might prompted by all of this!

(And since I ended my last post by talking about vehicular sound, I feel like I should add this link to a site that describes how the signature Harley thunder sound is crafted. Aural heritage on the hoof!)

The hand is greener than the eye

2008-09-21T05:49:00.001-07:00

I drove north through Vermont last weekend and stopped at the Interstate rest stop in Sharon, home of the Vermont Vietnam Veterans Memorial. At one point this memorial was just a granite plinth at the entrance to the rest area (where it always used to puzzle me, because it’s engraved with the line from the Gettysburg Address about “that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth,” and I could never quite figure out how the commemorators were seeing that in the context of the Vietnam War). It seems that in the mid-1990s, the rest area was going to be closed, in part because its septic system was inadequate, but veterans got together and made a case for not only saving the memorial but rebuilding the entire welcome center around it.

So now there’s this extremely interesting hybrid facility, opened in the fall of 2007 as part of an upgrade of Vermont’s whole welcome center system, that raises some questions for me about Vermont's relationship with automobility. There are four components to the new rest area. It’s a functional place for highway pit stops (bathrooms, picnic area, free coffee, tea, and WiFi). It’s a promotional place (with Vermont crafts as well as the usual brochures and information). It’s a much-expanded veterans’ memorial (incorporating a sizeable outdoor memorial area, a central column of names in the main building, and a panel exhibit about the Vietnam War and Vermont’s involvement in it.

And finally, it’s a “green” building that puts its own state-of-the-art infrastructure on display. The geothermal heating and cooling system is invisible, but the new waste disposal system is front and center, in the form of a greenhouse dome that houses a “living machine” where tropical plants and microorganisms process the waste and produce recycled, useable water. (This water is likely to be one of the first things people notice about the place when they come in, in fact, since it greets them—dyed avocado-green and explained by informational plaques—in the toilets).

The educational toilet water is just one illustration of the extraordinary degree of integration and seeming transparency among all the types of display here. Education, commemoration, promotion, and functionality are blended in a way that would make a brand manager weep with admiration. The brand, of course, is “Vermont,” and virtually everything here reinforces it: the native marble and granite in the memorial wall, the expression of “greenness” and environmental consciousness, the complimentary Green Mountain coffee, the views of the hills on the other side of the Interstate, the stories and pictures of the Vermont boys who didn’t come home from Vietnam, the handmade furniture on which you sit to check your email (creating a sneaky sense of sitting in someone’s living room rather than a state-sponsored welcome center).

I happen to love the Vermont brand and consume it avidly when I get the chance. This place, though, raises questions for me. Outside, at least in the parts of Vermont I tend to visit, the state brand always has some welcome rough edges and complexities, so it feels as though real people are always thinking about it and constructing it with their eyes open rather than just pushing a packaged product. There’s something about the Sharon Welcome Center that seems to head in the packaged direction, and I think it has to do with cars, or rather, with the way that they’ve been rendered almost invisible at this place that can only be reached via the Interstate.

I seem to recall that at the old Sharon welcome center, you parked at the bottom of the hill and walked up to the building. In the new layout, cars park at the top of the hill, behind the building, so that you literally leave the evidence of automobility behind you as you enter this beautiful and rather utopian space. Ahead of you are the Green Mountains (the veterans liked the location, we are told in the brochure and on the walls, in part because it is reminiscent of the landscape of the Southeast Asian highlands). I89 is not immediately visible from the building or the lawn.

Trucks and RVs still park down below, so I don’t want to read too much into this new spatial arrangement. But it does seem worth noting that while the septic arrangements have been incorporated into the exhibitionary space in an intriguing, educational, and aesthetically appealing way, the big, underlying infrastructure of the site—the highway and vehicles that are the only means of accessing it, and that constitute the circulatory system of Vermont’s considerable tourism industry—are tellingly pushed to the background. Exposing the septic sytem is compatible with the brand; exposing the role of the automobile would presumably be less so. And the literal transparency of the one—the glass dome that houses the “living machine”—serves as a trick to distract the mind’s eye so that it becomes easier not to see the other machines—the little (or in some cases, not so little) moving rooms that conveyed us here. In this context, it’s hard to decide whether the veterans’ memorial actually helps to sacralize a secular space or whether the memorial itself participates in the sleight-of-hand, opportunistically grabbing a little of the tourist audience while they’re in a receptive and potentially reflective mood.

My own trip through Vermont and back this time was a very speedy one, and I was pretty fried by the time I drove back south again a day and a half later. I was in that fully passive driving mode when I stopped at another of the new rest stops (liquid out, liquid in, and I don’t want to have to think about where any of it came from or where it’s going). But I did pause by the doorway on the way back out to my car to look at a much more traditional temporary panel exhibit that actually did focus on the history of Vermont’s Interstate highways. Other people were breezing past this without a second glance—the space did not in any way encourage contemplation, unlike the Sharon welcome center, which, as its brochure notes, “accommodates lingering thoughtful visits as well as brief highway stops.”

It’s interesting to think about the contrast between an exhibit panel in a classic “non-place” that exposes the mechanisms that created the site, versus a kind of hyper-branded exhibitionary space that serves to mask the mechanisms on which it (and much of the state’s economy) depends. Is the net effect essentially the same, I wonder? We all get back in our cars and drive on, creating wastes of various kinds (CO2, noise, the no-one’s-land of the Interstate corridors themselves) that we don’t want to scrutinize too directly. Perhaps it’s only safe to touch on them in isolated moments, not to bring them too centrally into grander statements about the greenness of the Green Mountain State.

For a New York Times article on the opening of the new Sharon rest area, click here.

For the work of a sound artist who does bring the actual noise of automobility into contemplative spaces, visit this page on Bruce Odland's work.

About this blog

2008-09-14T07:28:00.000-07:00

I’ve worked through a lot of ideas about history and heritage in the past dozen or so years, but the car part is new. Here’s my basic position on how history and heritage get produced (and this is far from original, by the way—it’s built on the thinking of Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Dean MacCannell , and many others):

* We can never make a simple or straightforward retrieval of anything from the past—there are always present-day mechanisms of collection and interpretation that shape what we know about the past.

* We give this knowledge different names—“history” and “heritage” are two of the main ones—depending on who is doing the retrieving and interpreting, and why.

*We usually want the mechanisms for creating knowledge about the past, like the mechanisms for producing tourist experiences, to be somewhat if not completely invisible. Modern humans have a huge thirst for “authentic” or unmediated experiences, and we’ve developed immensely complex infrastructures to provide them for us!

Those mechanisms, which have been studied in increasing detail over the past couple of decades, include museums, folklife displays, tourist attractions of all kinds, reenactments, parks and preserves, monuments and memorials. One component of all this that remains largely invisible, though, is the role of the internal combustion engine in shaping the contemporary landscape of heritage production. (The Centre for Mobilities Research—CeMoRe to its friends—is beginning to address this question, among others. This isn’t surprising, as this is the home base on British sociologist and influential tourism theorist John Urry. Click here for a paper by him on cars and other kinds of what he calls “weightless mobilities”).

I actually started out looking for ways to study the role of the car in American culture more directly, rather than thinking about it in relation to heritage production. I wanted to do some kind of engaged social scientific research that would contribute some useable knowledge to the current widespread attempt to unplug from our petroleum-powered economy and society. And on the list of things we would need to change radically in order to accomplish that unplugging, it has seemed to me that our use of cars is among the most intractable items. So much of our physical world and so many of our behavioral patterns are shaped by the car, particularly in North America. Remaking these landscapes and behaviors feels like one of the more overwhelming tasks on a long list of overwhelming tasks. Faced with what feels overwhelming or baffling, my typically egg-headed response is usually to design a research project about it.

So this blog represents a first step toward bringing together the intractable social/spatial question of how to shift our car culture for a post-carbon world with the ever-intriguing (well, to me, anyway) set of questions about how we construct our knowledge about the past. How many historic and heritage sites wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the automobile? How does the creation of a North American heritage infrastructure relate to the construction of a car culture, and to the development of various national, regional, and local identities? How do we display and memorialize car culture itself? How is all of this changing (or is it changing?) as the environmental, social, and economic consequences of our reliance on cheap, abundant petroleum become clearer and clearer to us? Is there any way to mobilize heritage display itself to help make the changes that we’re going to need to make?

Those are the kinds of things this blog will address, in the context of looking at some specific roadside attractions. (Note: This isn’t the only “History on Wheels” project – this one is a military vehicle museum in the U.K., and this is a vintage motorcycle club in India, while there are several that are more straightforward projects taking history “on the road” in some way. To my knowledge, though, this is the only “History on Wheels” project looking at the automobility and heritage production combo.)

It’s a new adventure for me to be putting out my field- and research-notes in a more or less public format like this one. But it seems to me that understanding and changing our automobility is a mammoth challenge that demands collective effort and pooled resources on many levels. So I’m putting my thoughts-in-progress into the mix, for whatever they’re worth. I hope to hear others’ in response!